1 [ liii 



IE VERNON 




Class 

Book 

CcpightN°_ 



COKRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



SOME TURNING-POINTS 
IN CHURCH HISTORY 



SOME TURNING-POINTS 

IN 

CHURCH HISTORY 



BEING 

THE SOUTHWORTH LECTURES 

IN ANDOVER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 

FOR THE YEAR 1915 



BY 

AMBROSE WHITE VERNON 

Minister of Harvard Church 
Brookline, Mass. 




THE PILGRIM PRESS 
BOSTON CHICAGO 






Copyright 1917 
By FRANK M. SHELDON 



OCT 25 M 



THE PILGRIM PRESS 
BOSTON 

•©CI.A47R709 




Sr 



TO MY TEACHER AND GUIDE 

ARTHUR CUSHMAN McGIFFERT 

PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY IN UNION THEOLOGICAL 

SEMINARY, NEW YORK CITY, 

IN ARIDING ADMIRATION AND AFFECTION 



NOTE 

These lectures are an attempt to consider those par- 
ticular crises in Church History which have been so 
far reaching as to determine the form of the organ- 
ization of the Christian Churches. Their polity 
has been determined chiefly, I believe, by four 
outstanding historical events; the founding of 
the Church, the establishment of the Christian 
Ministry, the organization of delimited National 
Churches and the formation of free Churches, 
independent of both ecclesiastical and civil 
authority. One lecture is devoted to each of 
these pivotal events and to them a fifth is added 
which deals with the establishment of free churches 
on the shores of America. 

The first of these lectures appeared in The Harvard 
Theological Review for January, 1917, and three 
of them have been delivered at Union Theological 
Seminary. 



CONTENTS 

LECTURE PAGE 

I The Founding of the Church ... 3 

II The Beginnings of the Christian 

Ministry 33 

III The Beginnings of the National 

Churches 63 

IV The Beginnings of the Free Churches 93 

V Contribution of Congregationalism to 

Church Polity 125 



LECTURE I 
THE FOUNDING OF THE CHUECH 



LECTUEE I 
THE FOUNDING OF THE CHURCH 

The church has come to have an enduring 
place not only in history but in thought. At 
least since the writing of The City of God it has 
decided some of the most vital questions con- 
fronting us because of a peculiar sanctity at- 
tached to it. It is not therefore out of place 
to demand from time to time that it show us its 
credentials. The present lecture is an attempt 
to discover if there is anything peculiarly 
sacred about the manner of its founding that 
would justify us in ascribing unique spiritual 
authority to it. 

And the surprising fact which we discover is, 
that we cannot discover any actual founding 
of the church whatever. We cannot be sure 
that the church was founded in any accurate 
sense of that term; it is probably more in 
accord with the facts to say that the movement 
which eventually became known as the church 
grew. Creation by fiat seems as mythical in 
this sphere as in more material realms. It 
seems as if there were a church almost before 
its members knew it. 

In endeavoring to show that the founding of 
the church is obscure and to discover some rea- 

3 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

sons for such obscurity, we shall be obliged to 
see if we can trace the rise of the idea of 
the church in the minds of the early friends 
and disciples of Jesus. Of course ideas and 
words are never quite conterminous. A word 
never covers an idea. If a word is laid on top 
of an idea, the idea peeps out all around it. Yet 
at the same time before an idea can clothe itself 
with a word it is in a pre-natal state and can- 
not be said to be properly born. And so, it 
seems to me, our first, but not our only, duty 
in attempting to come upon the birth-hour of 
the Christian church, is to discover, if we may, 
when the word "church" was first applied, 
either by its friends or its foes or its members, 
to the group of people who were held together 
by common devotion to Jesus of Nazareth, 
whom they recognized as the Christ. 

Strictly speaking, there is only one thing to 
say : that we do not know when this word was 
first applied. But because we cannot know pre- 
cisely, we are not excused from finding out all 
that we can know ; because our sources are not 
all that we would wish them to be, there is no 
good reason for refusing to find out from them 
all that they have to tell us. We must there- 
fore examine those early chapters of the Acts 
of the Apostles which contain virtually all that 
has even the faintest suggestion of being first- 
hand information about the earliest months 
and years in and about Jerusalem after the 
death of Jesus. 

4 



The Founding of the Church 

There are so few things that are certain 
about the authorship of the historical books of 
the New Testament that it is refreshing to 
come upon one of the few in connection with 
this book of the Acts. There can be no doubt 
that it was written by the same hand as that 
which wrote the Third Gospel. In the preface 
to that Gospel, the author virtually tells us that 
he has consulted various sources for informa- 
tion. The structure and language of the Acts 
lead us to the supposition that when he came 
to write the Acts he followed the practice he 
had used in waiting the Gospel. Students of 
the book have fathered many theories concern- 
ing its structure, but they have had most to 
say about two sources which many of them 
have believed to underlie this work. One of 
these is the familiar "We" source, so called 
because of the sudden and unexplained appear- 
ance of the first personal pronoun in some of 
the later travels of Paul; the other has been 
even more vaguely denominated and it has 
been supposed to underlie the first, say, twelve 
chapters of the book, which are devoted to giv- 
ing us a picture of the beginnings of the church 
in Jerusalem. Harnack, who has recently made 
a valiant attempt to identify the author of the 
"We" passages with the author of the entire 
work, still admits Luke's use of probably writ- 
ten sources for the first portion of the book. 1 
The book itself cannot have been written of 

1 Lukas der Arzt, pp. 84-5. Die Apostelgeschichte, Capitel 5. 

5 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

course before the last event therein narrated 
— the arrival of Paul in Eome. By that time, 
as the letters of Paul testify, the word 
' i church' ' was applied as a matter of course 
to the local Christian communities. The author 
of the Acts, a Pauline admirer, would, there- 
fore, be accustomed to use the word " church" 
for the various groups of Christian disciples 
of whom he was writing and in particular for 
the church at Jerusalem, which Paul so 
peculiarly revered. Under these circum- 
stances, we must attribute either to a phenom- 
enal intuition or to his sources the astonishing 
fact that until "the persecution against the 
church that was in Jerusalem" arose on the 
outburst and martyrdom of Stephen, 2 we have 
only one single instance of the use of the word 
"church" for the Christian circle. 

We hear of the filling out of the apostolate, 
of the descent of the spirit in the upper room, 
of the large addition to the Christian company 
through the inspired speech of Peter, of the 
first startling miracle performed by him and 
John, of the imprisonment of the apostles and 
their courage and release, of the growth of the 
"multitude which believed" and of their 
brotherly life, and though it seems to us the 
most natural thing in the world to speak of 
these events as the beginnings of the church, 
that notable word is not once employed. We 
are further instructed concerning the deceit 

r <Acts 8:1. 



The Founding of the Church 

and death of Ananias and Sapphira, of the re- 
newed imprisonment and release of the apos- 
tles, of the strife between the Hellenists and 
the Hebrews, of the appointment of seven men 
to see that they were treated equally in the dis- 
tribution of food, of the character and genius 
of Stephen, of his epoch-making speech in the 
temple, of the rage of his hearers and of his 
martyrdom; and though we should expect the 
word " church' ' in every paragraph, it occurs 
but once as a designation of the disciples. And 
its occurrence is neither in connection with any 
of the pivotal events of these stirring days, 
nor in the heart of any of the narratives, nor 
in those wonderful speeches of Peter arid 
Stephen, so full of verisimilitude and breath- 
ing the spirit of the most primitive Christian 
theology ; we find it in what I think may, under 
these circumstances, be confidently regarded 
as one of those seams with which an author is 
accustomed to join together independent nar- 
ratives. Just at the close of the story of the 
death of Ananias and Sapphira, and before 
the transition to the healing ministry of Peter 
and the imprisonment of the apostles, we read 
these words: "And great fear came upon the 
whole church and upon all who heard these 
things. ' ' 3 This is the solitary use of that 
classic word in The Book of the Acts until the 
time of Stephen. Instead of this word 
" church/ 9 which we should have used con- 

3 Acts 5 : 11. 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

stantly and which all our teachers use 
constantly in the retelling of these brilliant 
narratives, we find other words, much less 
pretentious, to us much less characteristic — 
"believers," "brethren," "their own com- 
pany," and "disciples." Of these the word 
"disciples" seems to be the technical word, or 
to be becoming the technical word, for this un- 
technical group of people who were expecting 
their Lord from heaven. It might have re- 
mained such, had not, as we read, "the disciples 
been called Christians first at Antioch. ' ' 4 In- 
deed until, in the last part of the eleventh 
chapter, after the conversion of both Paul and 
Cornelius has been recorded, we get to Antioch, 
whither certain men of Cyprus and Cyrene fled 
on the death of Stephen and where they 
preached the Lord Jesus to Greeks as well as 
Jews, the word "church" is used only in the 
seams of the narrative. Even in those seams, 
it occurs but four times and save for the obvi- 
ously editorial sentence, "So the church had 
peace," 5 it does not occur at all in that portion 
of the early chapters of Acts which on alto- 
gether other grounds Harnack assigns to the 
ancient Jerusalemic source. 6 

This peculiar state of affairs must not be 
dismissed from our minds until we have in- 
quired whether it may have any historical sig- 

4 Acts 11 : 86. 

5 Acts 9 : 81. 

6 Die Apostelgeschichte, pp. 14.8-152. 

8 



The Founding of the Church 

nificance for our inquiry concerning the origin 
of the church. 

I have said that the word "church" was 
never used in the heart of the early narratives 
or in the course of the early speeches to de- 
scribe the disciples of Jesus. But once in the 
midst of Stephen's speech we find these words: 
"This is he [that Moses] . . . which was in 
the church in the wilderness with the angel 
that spake to him in the m,ount Sinai. ' } 7 The 
word ' ' church, ' ' though apparently not applied 
to the Christian groups in the earliest times, 
was applied by a prominent member of those 
groups to the Israelitish nation quite as a mat- 
ter of course. That this is no mere accident is 
abundantly proved by reference to the Septua- 
gint. Here we find the word "ecclesia," 
" church, " used 71 times to translate "kahal" 
or its derivatives. It is also used 23 times in 
those parts of the Septuagint for which we 
have no Hebrew original. It is always em- 
ployed as the equivalent of our word " assem- 
bly " or "company." It is the word usually 
employed to denote the assembly of Israel, in 
what we should call the ecclesiastical or exclu- 
sive sense. When, for example, we read that 
"an Ammonite and a Moabite shall not enter 
into the assembly of God forever," the word 
for "assembly" is the word "ecclesia." When 
it is said that "the transgressor shall be cut 
off from the assembly of my people," it is 

7 Acts 7 : 38. 

9 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

again the word "ecclesia" that is used. Har- 
nack calls attention to the fact that in the 
Septuagint "ecclesia" is usually the word used 
to translate "kahal," the most sacred word 
for the entire nation, whereas "synagogue" is 
used to translate "edhah," a more secular 
word. 8 

It therefore seems proper to suppose that 
the reason why the early Christians did not 
employ the word "church" to designate their 
own gatherings is because they used it to 
designate the assembly of the Jews to which 
they still regarded themselves as belonging. 
And that the author of the Acts preserved this 
interesting fact in his sources may be due to 
his knowledge of the Septuagint from which 
his Old Testament citations are taken. 

While the fact that the early disciples of 
Jesus still regarded themselves as "Hebrews 
of the Hebrews" is well known of course to 
scholars, though not always duly appreciated 
even by them, it is widely ignored by most of 
us. This ignorance of ours makes it still dif- 
ficult for us to do justice to the position and 
the emotions of that mother "church" in Jeru- 
salem. It is, however, written clearly on the 
records that the early Christians "were con- 
tinually in the temple blessing God," 9 that the 
apostles "went up to the temple at the hour of 
prayer," 10 after they had seen the risen Lord, 

8 Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums, p. 292. Note 4- 
• Luke 24 : 63. 
io Acts 3 : 1. 

10 



The Founding of the Church 

just as they had before, and that they preached 
in one of the porches of the temple X1 — and 
probably in the synagogues — as those who felt 
themselves there at home. 

The old Latin prologue to Mark's Gospel 
asserts that Mark, after having become a Chris- 
tian, cut off his thumb so that he should not be 
eligible for the priesthood. 12 This tradition 
confirms the letter and the spirit of the early 
chapters of Acts, and indicates that to the Jews 
faith in Jesus as Christ did not disqualify a 
man for ritual service in the holy place so 
surely as the lack of a thumb. Nothing was 
further from the minds of the disciples than to 
cut themselves off from the church or assembly 
of the Jews. Why should they take such a 
step ? They alone among their people had been 
permitted to recognize the Messiah. Soon their 
leader was to descend from heaven to restore 
the kingdom to Israel and to choose from 
their group those who were to reign over the 
tribes of the nation. Would such a confident 
hope lead them to make less or more of those 
laws which had been given to prepare the way 
of the Lord and which they had kept in com- 
pany with him? He was crucified not for de- 
nouncing the Jews, but for claiming to be the 
Jews' prince. They had not separated from 
their church w ; hen they were baptized by John ; 
thereby they had been only more surely ad- 

" Acts S : 11, 12. 

12 Cf. Weiss: Das alteste Evangelium, 77. 400. 

11 



Some Taming -Points in Church History 

mitted into membership of the coming king- 
dom of the Messiah. And when either at Pen- 
tecost or at the time of the earthquake they had 
been baptized with the Holy Ghost, they were 
not thereby separated from their people ; they 
were merely given the power to bring that king- 
dom in. More than ever they recognized them- 
selves as necessary to the redemption and to 
the exaltation of the Jewish nation. It was 
they who were to enable their countrymen to 
repent so that their sins might be blotted out, 
and in consequence the Lord might be sent from 
heaven. Hence they called themselves " be- 
lievers' ' as distinguished from their unbeliev- 
ing countrymen, "disciples" as distinguished 
from crucifiers and mockers of their Messiah, 
and "brethren" as their Lord had indeed al- 
ready called them; but the thought of cutting 
themselves off from the church of the Jews, 
the assembly of the people of God, did not 
occur to them for a long time. And until it so 
occurred to them, the church of Jesus Christ, 
in any accurate sense of the words, as distin- 
guished from the church of the Jewish people, 
could not have been founded. 

"When we ask ourselves, therefore, regard- 
ing the founding of the Christian church, we 
ask ourselves to discover the point of time or 
the point of consciousness when the Christian 
disciples regarded themselves not as a part of 
the Jewish nation but as a substitute for the 

12 



The Founding of the Church 

Jewish nation, not as belonging to the people 
of God but as constituting the people of God. 

And here it may be well to repeat the state- 
ment which was made at the outset and which 
I hope has become already better established. 
We cannot come upon any one moment of his- 
tory when the church was founded; we cannot 
tell whether the church was founded ; it is prob- 
ably more in accord with the facts to say that 
it grew. Our sources do not record any final 
and explicit break of the disciples with the 
Jewish nation. They do, however, record such 
a change of the relations of the disciples with 
the Jewish church at one particular point and 
perhaps also at one particular place that we 
may say that then the church consciousness, 
absent before, had arisen. 

In our search for that moment when the early 
disciples regarded themselves as the holy 
group which had been substituted in the favor 
of God for the ancient people of Israel, we find 
five events which chiefly call for our scrutiny. 
It may also be said that these five events seem 
to church historians somehow or other to mark 
the beginning of the church. 

The first of these events occurred while our 
Lord was yet upon the earth, going himself 
habitually into the synagogue on the Sabbath 
and regarding the temple as his Father's house. 
It is that solemn moment that is set aside for 
us all from other moments of time, when at 
Caesarea Philippi, on a brief retirement from 

13 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

the confines of Palestine, Simon Peter recog- 
nized Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah. Now 
there can be no question that that moment 
marked the definite recognition of the supreme 
authority of Jesus Christ, and that it helped 
to give to the words spoken on the mount and 
by the sea, to the parables of the publican and 
the prodigal and the ministering Samaritan, 
the carrying power through which they swept 
through — and swept out — the world. But does 
that recognition of Jesus as the Messiah 
amount to the laying of the corner stone of the 
Christian Church? There is no such thought 
in the earliest of the Gospels which report the 
event. 13 Only in the Gospel of Matthew do we 
find an interpolation in the older account which 
might be construed in that sense. There we 
read that Jesus blessed Peter for recognizing 
him as the Messiah, and added, "Thou art 
Peter, and upon this rock will I build my 
church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail 
against it. ' ' 14 

It is to this passage that those resort who like 
to call Jesus "the Founder of the Church." 
But there are three reasons which render it im- 
possible to believe that we have here to do with 
such an event. In the first place, the verb is in 
the future rather than in the present tense. If 
Jesus is to be regarded as the personal founder 
of the church, it must be at some future and un- 



13 Mark 8 : 29. 
w Matt. 16 : 18. 



14 



The Founding of the Church 

discoverable moment. In the second place, the 
words, if spoken by Jesus, would almost in- 
evitably have been treasured with his most 
sacred utterances. It is well-nigh inconceiv- 
able that Mark would have omitted them as too 
unimportant to mention, or that they would 
have found — as seems the case — no place in 
the Logia, the earliest collection of Jesus' say- 
ings. The ;fact that the word " church' ' is 
never put into Jesus ' mouth in the New Testa- 
ment except here and in another passage in 
this same Gospel of Matthew is very significant. 
And the second passage bears even more un- 
mistakable jmarks of a late origin. There Jesus 
is represented as saying, "If a brother sin 
against thee and thou tell it to the church, and 
he refuse to hear the church, let him be unto 
thee as the Gentile and the publican. ' ' 15 Not 
only the word "church" but the words "Gen- 
tile" and "publican" seem utterly out of place 
on Jesus ' lips, in the significance in which they 
are used. Moreover the conception of Jesus' 
band of disciples as a disciplinary organization 
seems quite unhistorical. If Jesus used the 
words at all, the church to which he alluded was 
the Jewish Church and not the Christian one. 
And in the third place, we are confident that 
the recognition of Jesus as the Messiah does 
not mark the founding of the Christian Church, 
because after that recognition Jesus went with 
his disciples into the temple and purified its 

is Matt, 18 :17. 

15 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

courts, and partook of the feast of the Passover 
with his disciples, as though they were all still 
members of the Jewish Church. In it, indeed, 
he had peculiar power, but to it he and they 
alike belonged. The break with the Jews had 
not vet come. 

"Weizsacker and Bacon are at one in regard- 
ing Peter rather than Jesus as the Founder of 
the church. Thev regard him as such, how- 
ever, not because of his recognition of Jesus at 
C^esarea Philippi as the Messiah, but because 
he was the first to whom Christ was revealed 
in resurrection glory. 16 "He appeared to 
Peter" — this phrase out of the 15th of 1st 
Corinthians seems to them to point to a greater 
vision of Peter than any he had while Jesus 
walked by his side, and in virtue of which he 
became the founder of the Christian Church. 
Yet they hesitate to say definitely that the 
appearance of Jesus to Peter marked the 
founding of the church; the event was too per- 
sonal for that, and, as personal, it has quite 
disappeared from the narrative of the Acts. 
McGiffert, who inclines to the belief that Peter 
was the "second founder of the church" 17 does, 
however, single out another definite moment — 
of great importance in Christian history — for 
our attention in seeking for the origin of the 

church. "That Christianity has had a his- 

■ 

15 TT\- .':?.: >-.■--■■: Dtu wposiolis:*.* Zeitalier, vp. 5. IS. 15. Bacon: Foundmg 
Chapter 2. 

'-' .4::;::':'; A-;-:, p. -,5. 

16 



The Founding of the Church 

tory," he writes, 18 "is due to the fact that these 
disciples did not go back disheartened to their 
old pursuits and live on as if they had never 
known Jesus, but that on the contrary, filled 
with the belief that their Master still lived and 
conscious of holding a commission from him, 
they banded themselves together with the re- 
solve of completing his work and preparing 
their countrymen for his return. Their resolve, 
put into execution when they left Galilee and 
returned to Jerusalem, marks the real starting- 
point in the history of the church.' J If indeed 
they came to any such clear-cut resolve, the mo- 
ment of that resolve plays an important part 
in the gathering together of Christian believers, 
but that gathering would have regarded itself 
not as a church but as a favored group within 
the Jewish Church. Preuschen, who also em- 
phasizes the place of Peter among the Chris- 
tian disciples, seems better to express the facts 
when he says, "Peter gathered a company of 
like-minded people, but without giving up com- 
munion with the Jewish people and the Jewish 
faith." 19 

The Day of Pentecost is the third great mo- 
ment in the history of Christianity which has 
been hit upon for the founding of the Christian 
Church, which seems so curiously to baffle our 
search. Of all these moments it seems most 
widely chosen for this great honor. "While 

18 Apostolic Age, p. 1+2. 

19 Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte: Das Altertum, bearbeitet von Erwin 
Preuschen, p. 37. 

17 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

the apostles and disciples," writes Philip 
Schaff, " about one hundred and twenty in 
number, no doubt mostly Galileans, were as- 
sembled before the morning devotions of the 
festal day and were waiting in prayer for the 
fulfilment of the promise, the exalted Saviour 
sent from his heavenly throne the Holy Spirit 
upon them and founded his church upon earth. 
The church of the new covenant was ushered 
into existence with startling signs which filled 
the spectators with wonder and fear. ? ' 20 And 
George P. Fisher, not quite so certainly, writes, 
' 'With the day of Pentecost the career of the 
'Church Militant ' fairly begins." 21 And Wil- 
helm Moller, still more cautiously, says, "The 
Spirit, proceeding from the Ascended One, not 
the earthly manifestation of Jesus nor his 
teaching in itself, is the really church-founding 
[element], yet even this [is to be taken] in the 
sense that the separation of this particular fel- 
lowship from the general religious-national 
fellowship of the Jewish people was first the 
result of a gradual process." 22 

But the result of that outpouring of the 
spirit was not the founding of a church but 
the preaching to brethren of an already estab- 
lished church by those who were thus spiritu- 
ally endowed from on high. So far was Peter, 
who was the spokesman of those thus filled with 
the spirit, from thinking that a new church had 

20 History of the Christian Church, Vol. I, p. 228. 

nibid., Vol. I, p. 19. 

22 Lehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte, Vol. I, p. 50. 

18 



The Founding of the Church 

been founded and that he had been cut off from 
his people, that he appealed to his fellow Jew- 
ish Church members to hear the prophet of 
whom Moses had testified, saying, " Every soul 
that heareth not that prophet shall be cut off 
from among the people. ? ,23 Peter evidently ex- 
pected that the Lord was about to purify that 
ancient church, which had been aln^ost " since 
the world began." It is impossible therefore 
to think that the Day of Pentecost marks the 
moment when the disciples believed themselves 
to supplant the children of Israel as the chosen 
people of God. They were reformers, not 
revolutionists. 

The fourth event, of sufficient importance to 
call for a brief mention, is the choice of seven 
men by the early believers to see to it that 
equitable division of food and necessaries of life 
was made between the Jewish and Hellenistic 
widows among the disciples in Jerusalem. It 
is hard for us not to use the word "church" in 
this connection, but it does not appear to have 
entered into the mind of the author of the Acts ; 
"When the number of the disciples was mul- 
tiplying," is the sentence with which he intro- 
duces the narrative. 24 This incident was 
enhanced in its importance for a long time by 
the almost universal belief among church his- 
torians that it marked the institution of the 
diaconate, thereby regarded as the earliest 



23 Acts 3 : 21 

24 Acts 6:1. 



19 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

body of which they had positive information in 
the early church. A more careful reading of 
the account, however, has brought to light that 
these seven men were chosen for a temporary 
and definite task, and that they are never once 
named deacons in the book which narrates 
their selection by the disciples. Their selection, 
therefore, does not betray any church-con- 
sciousness. 

There is le'ft for our final scrutiny an event 
that is connected with one of these seven men 
who were chosen to oversee the distribution 
of food among the widows of the disciples in 
Jerusalem. Stephen had engaged in serious 
and keen dispute with the members of one of 
the synagogues in Jerusalem. It is not alto- 
gether clear what that dispute was about. But 
so fundamental was it in character that his 
opponents summoned him before the council 
and the high priest called upon him for his de- 
fence. Nothing can be clearer than that 
Stephen was recognized as a Jew in regular 
standing, and that he recognized the high priest 
as the chief power in the church to which he 
felt that he belonged and concerning which, 
indeed, by that very title he spoke in the de- 
fence that he made before the council. To him 
the church was still the Jewish church, the 
people of God. In his defence, he seems to 
have laid emphasis on two quite diverse points 
— the blindness of heart that had always char- 
acterized Israel, and the temporary character of 

20 



The Founding of the Church 

all buildings made with hands, whether syna- 
gogue, tabernacle, or even temple. The report 
of his speech is too fragmentary for us to be 
certain concerning his thought. That he men- 
tioned Jesus is clear, but precisely what he 
said about him we cannot tell. It seems, how- 
ever, overwhelmingly probable that he set him 
higher than Moses both before God and in the 
church of the Jewish people. At the close of 
his defence the council and the witnesses stoned 
him to death. Thus they separated him from 
the people of God, from the church, in the man- 
ner prescribed in the law. The disciples were 
aware that he had been stoned for the convic- 
tions which many of them shared. It may be 
that the closest friends of Jesus did not agree 
with Stephen in what he may have said about 
the temporary character of Jewish institutions, 
for we read that the apostles remained at Jeru- 
salem during the persecution which now broke 
out there upon the disciples. But a great num- 
ber of the most loyal Christians were compelled 
to flee from the sacred city, under a virtual 
sentence of excommunication from the church 
to which they had up to that time given most 
devoted adhesion. The authorities of the 
church of God had denied their right to par- 
take of the worship of the temple and of the 
privileges and promises of the fathers. What 
was to be done? In the Book of Acts we read: 
" They therefore that were scattered abroad 
upon the tribulation that arose about Stephen 

21 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

travelled as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and 
Antioch, speaking the word to none save only 
to the Jews. But there were some of them, men 
of Cyprus and Cyrene" — of the very syna- 
gogue to which Stephen seems to have been 
attached — "who, when they were come to An- 
tioch, spake unto the Greeks also, preaching 
the Lord Jesus. And it came to pass that even 
for a whole year they were gathered together 
in the church, and that the disciples were called 
Christians first at Antioch. ' ' 25 

The fact that in this short passage, which I 
have curtailed in citing, the infrequent word 
"church" occurs twice, has some significance, 
particularly as it occurs in the heart of the 
narrative; but the striking thing is that the 
disciples were no longer Jews either in their 
own eyes or in the eyes of outsiders. They were 
a new company, made up of Jews and Greeks, a 
new religious group, whose main characteristics 
were developed from their allegiance to a 
Christ, whatever that term may have meant to 
those who first dubbed them by the immortal 
nickname "Christian." But we can tell what 
it meant to the disciples. To all of them, 
whether Greeks or Jews, Jesus was the Christ. 
Certainly here has arisen the consciousness of 
being a peculiar people of God, of having a 
standing with the Messiah, which the Jews as 
such no longer shared with them. Throughout 
the book of the Acts we find a continual sense 

25 Acts 11 : 19, 20, 26. 

22 



The Founding of the Church 

of the turning from the Jews, who rejected 
their own Christ, to the Gentiles, who accepted 
the Jewish Christ and yet no longer the Jewish 
Christ. For, as the Fourth Gospel has it, he 
had come "unto his own and his own had re- 
ceived him not. But as many as received him, 
to them gave he the right to become children 
of God, who were born not of blood but of 
God. ' ' 26 Jesus soon ceased to be the prince 
of the Jewish nation and became "the Head 
over all things to the church, which is . . . the 
fulness of Him that filleth all in all." 27 The 
church was the kingdom of God; in it Jesus 
reigned; to it he brought his gifts. It was the 
saints in Corinth and Eome and Ephesus that 
were to judge the angels. 28 They were in time 
past no people, but they had become the people 
of God. 29 When this feeling arose, the word 
"church," heretofore used to denote assem- 
blies which considered themselves sacred, 
whether of Diana in Ephesus or of the people 
of Jehovah, was naturally applied to the Chris- 
tian disciples. It was applied at first perhaps 
to all Christian disciples in their capacity of 
people of God, but it soon became common to 
call each local Christian assembly by that 
name. 

I do not wish to be understood as locating 
the origin of the church by detecting the pres- 



26 John 1 : 12, 13. 

27 Ephesians 1 : 22, 28 

28 1 Corinthians 6 : 3. 
2 » 1 Peter 2 : 10. 



23 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

ence or absence of any single word. The word 
"church" had never come in the Septuagint to 
have a strictly sacred meaning. For example, 
there occurs in the Psalms the phrase, "the 
assembly of evil doers," 30 where the word 
which is translated by "assembly" in English 
is translated by "ecclesia" in Greek. We must 
by no means decide the origin of the church by 
the mere use of the Greek word for it. And yet 
I feel that, roughly speaking, the growth of the 
idea "church" among the disciples may be said 
to coincide with the use of the word "ecclesia" 
to designate their gatherings. And I find very 
great significance in Epiphanius ' declaration — 
which seems to bewilder some of the historians 
— that the Jewish Christians rejected the word 
"church" as a designation for their gatherings 
in favor of the word ' ' synagogue. ' ? 31 They 
could not bring themselves to give their endur- 
ing allegiance to anything but the Jewish 
Church nor to find in Jesus anything but the 
Jewish Messiah, whom they were fortunate 
enough to recognize. I feel that Weizsacker is 
right in affirming that the Christians in general 
would not call themselves a synagogue, because 
they believed themselves to be in possession of 
the kingdom of God and to constitute the church 
of God. 32 "The church of God" was perhaps 
the first name rather than "the church of 
Christ," because it was "the people of God" 

so Psalms 26 : 5. 

21 Epiphanii Opera: ed. Dindorfius, Vol. II. p. 110. 

^Weizsacker: Das apostolische Zeitalter, pp. 39-40. 

24 



The Founding of the Church 

and not "the people of Christ" for which it was 
substituted. 33 

But it is not the use of the word "church" 
upon which I would place the chief emphasis. 
It is used but 23 times in the entire book of the 
Acts, 34 that is to say, infrequently even after 
the founding of the church in Antioch. It is 
true that while it is little used, and not used at 
all in most of the early chapters of the Acts 
where we should have constantly expected it, it 
is used constantly in the letters of Paul. But 
as I have said, we must not depend upon the use 
of a word to point us to the moment when the 
thing the word denotes arose. Our idea of the 
founding of the church depends in large degree 
upon the connotation of the word "church" for 
us. It seems to me that by the word "church" 
the early Christians meant the peculiar people 
of God. In Sohm's masterly Kirchenrecht the 
church is said to signify "a gathering of the 
New Testament Covenant people before and 
with God. ' ' 35 That they were His peculiar 
covenant people seems to have dawned upon 
them in Antioch, or going to Antioch, where 
they were first set off from the rest of the 
world as Christians at about the time when that 
nickname was first fastened upon them. There- 
fore it seems to me correct to say that the 
church — in the sense in which its first members 
understood it — was founded neither by the 

33 Cf. Acts 20:28; Gal. 1 : 22; 1 Thess. 1:1. 

34 Cf. Harnack: Lukas der Arzt, p. 25, n. 3. 
35 Kirchenrecht, Vol. I, p. 18. 

25 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

Lord (save as all things were believed to be 
under His control) nor by Peter, neither at 
CaBsarea Philippi nor on the Day of Pentecost, 
but when, after the excommunication of 
Stephen, the disciples found themselves ban- 
ished from the church of the Jews and yet not 
without God or hope in the world. It was 
founded in part by those who upon that perse- 
cution went everywhere preaching the word — 
and making a people out of those who had 
never been a people — and partly also by the 
council of the Jews who stoned Stephen as he 
was calling upon God and saying, "Lord Jesus, 
receive my spirit ! ' ' 

If this be true, or in the direction of the 
truth, the exact moment of the founding of the 
church cannot be marked off accurately, nor is 
it important so to mark it off. The church was 
an outgrowth of historical development and 
came into being through the opposition of 
the foes of Jesus to the claim of his friends to a 
place in the church of the Jews to which he and 
they had alike belonged and which was un- 
speakably precious to them all. Stephen and 
those who stoned him must be regarded as the 
most likely founders of the Christian Church. 

These beginnings of the Christian Church 
justify two considerations. In the first place, 
neither Jesus nor his earliest disciples were 
separatists. They did not separate. They 
were separated by the authorities from the 
church to which they belonged. The love of 

26 



The Founding of the Church 

Jesus for the Jewish Church, for its temple and 
its synagogues, is apt in our time to be ob- 
scured. He began his public career at Naza- 
reth by employing the opportunity open to Jew- 
ish teachers in the synagogue. Among the 
events which brought about his death, his start- 
ling cleansing of the temple occupies a prom- 
inent place. To him the Jewish temple was a 
house of prayer for all nations, a place where 
all men were to find access to their God, as 
children in a Father's house, a place wide 
enough for him and inexpressibly sacred to 
him. He realized that the Jewish people 
needed a new conception of the mercy and lov- 
ing-kindness of their God. But there was noth- 
ing further from his mind than the proclama- 
tion of a new God or the establishment of a 
new family. He appealed constantly to the 
Scriptures as an authority against the newer 
traditions of his time. He had no wish to sep- 
arate from the Ten Commandments and from 
the twenty-third Psalm. He had only come to 
fulfil the expectations of men whom he regarded 
as the very spokesmen of God. One of the 
great problems of New Testament study is the 
degree to which he opened the Kingdom of 
Heaven to any save Jewish believers. The God 
he revered was the God of his fathers ; it was 
of that God that he believed himself the Son. 
We cannot of course conceive that he believed 
Jews only to have a duty toward God, but, un- 
less our sources utterly deceive us, he believed 

27 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

that the highest duty men could have was 
toward the God of the Jews. A Bible without 
the New Testament is to us an absurdity; a 
Bible without the Old Testament would have 
been to him a blasphemy; perhaps we ought 
to say that any other Bible than the Old Testa- 
ment was for him unthinkable. Be that as it 
may, Jesus was anything but a dogmatist; he 
was not beginning religious history de novo; 
the majestic utterances of the Jewish prophets 
were to him a revelation of the eternal God. 
Inclusion and reverence were the marks of his 
religious temper; the fanaticism and narrow- 
ness of come-outers seem completely foreign to 
his spirit ; he came to expand and not to contract 
the boundaries of the family of God. I am sure 
that he would regard any holy fellowship as in- 
complete which did not include the sublime 
ethical monotheists from whom he sprang. 
What he would have us remember is that he 
died not by the Jews but for them. 

And the second consideration is thus: the 
spirit of Jesus was much more important to 
our Lord than the church of Jesus. With the 
one he would have identified himself; of the 
other he knew nothing. If we must choose be- 
tween the spirit of Jesus without a church and 
the church of Jesus without his spirit, we 
will choose the former. Undue attention 
to the organization of the church and to 
its useful ceremonies has blurred, distorted, 
almost erased, the spirit of Jesus, which 

28 



The Founding of the Church 

was before the church and is independent 
of it. There can be no donbt that history- 
has justified by the stern law of necessity 
the gathering and the maintenance of the 
Christian Church. It embraces for us, as for 
the fellow-believers of Stephen and of Paul, all 
people who believe on God through Jesus, His 
well-beloved Son, and who through that belief 
stand in a peculiar relation of intimacy with 
Him. But no more with us than with Jesus is 
the church the object of our spiritual allegi- 
ance; our supreme devotion must, like his, be 
reserved for God and men. And the ultimate 
purpose of our lives must be not to build up 
a strong church but to open the human heart 
through all possible means to the divine spirit 
of Jesus. 



29 



LECTURE II 

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE CHRISTIAN 

MINISTRY 



LECTURE II 

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE CHRISTIAN 

MINISTRY 

The first great moment in ecclesiastical his- 
tory, as we have seen, was the establishment 
of the church. The precise moment of its es- 
tablishment eluded us, but we felt that we 
could come within a few years of it. And al- 
though the cause of its establishment was not 
exactly stated in the early records, it seemed 
comparatively clear that it was brought about 
by the decision of the leaders of the Jews not 
to allow the followers of Jesus to worship with 
them. It was through their expulsion from the 
Jewish Church that the early disciples were 
forced to believe that God had gathered a new 
church for Himself out of those who recognized 
the Messiahship of Jesus. And when the Gen- 
tiles also accepted him they realized that those 
who were his people were called to be the 
people of God and so to separate themselves 
from all other people of the world. 

The second great moment in ecclesiastical 
history was another moment of separation, the 
separation of the Christian clergy from the 
laity of the church, the origin of the Christian 
ministry as a distinct class among Christian 

33 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

believers, the fixing of a deep gulf between 
ordinary and extraordinary Christian disciples. 
We must now try to discover the origin of this 
fateful distinction in the Christian church and 
the causes which produced it. 

Among Protestant scholars, there seems 
to be little difference of opinion either about the 
beginning or the end of this inquiry of ours. 
We seem to know both the starting-point and 
the goal of that movement in the Christian 
church which produced a Christian hierarchy, 
culminating in the power and authority of the 
pontifex maximus, the Bishop of Rome. It is 
about the impulses and the stages of the move- 
ment that sharp diversity of opinion exists. 
With the meager time and limited scholarship 
at my disposal, it would be futile for me to at- 
tempt to trace the exact evolution of the Chris- 
tian bishop, the Christian pastor with a sugges- 
tion of priest, the figure which dominates the 
development with which we are to-day con- 
cerned. It does not seem to me that the sources 
which are open to us allow us to be dogmatic 
concerning it. I am anxious, simply, to dis- 
cover sufficient grounds for the institution of 
the distinction between clergymen and laymen 
in the church, to estimate their moral worth, and 
to aid in deciding whether the distinction is of 
Christ or of Anti-Christ. 

The starting-point of this movement toward 
the bishopric is made thoroughly clear to us 
in Paul's earlier letters, and particularly in his 

34 



The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 

letters to the Corinthians. In these letters we 
find the people of Christ governed by the Holy 
Ghost. The important question whether that 
Holy Ghost proceeded from God or from Christ 
need not here detain us. In any case, it de- 
scended from above upon the disciples of Christ 
and upon them alone. It imparted power to 
each but the power was diverse. It was given 
only in part for the individual who received it, 
chiefly for the community of which each was a 
citizen. Every Christian was an ordained man 
— ordained by divine power for a divinely or- 
dered function of a divine people. There was 
no male or female, no Greek or Jew, no bond 
or free. The Spirit gave to each not as each 
would but as He would. There were no orders 
and there was not much order. It cannot be said 
that the first beatitude was much in vogue in 
the first century. To be poor in spirit was not 
as common in the Christian churches as to be 
poor in this world's goods. And I imagine that 
we could find no surer way to understand why 
this beatitude stands at the top of the list than 
to be ushered into a gathering of the primitive 
church. It was not a self-governed body; it 
was not an ecclesiastically-governed body; it 
was a spirit-governed body. And it would ap- 
pear that the gifts of the spirit ignored each 
other. One would spring to his feet in ecstasy 
in one corner and another in another; others 
would feel suddenly called upon to interpret 
these mysterious shoutings and babblings and 

35 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

contortions to tlieir fellows ; two or three would 
feel called upon at once by the Spirit to pro- 
claim a message from God to men. In spite of 
the sincerity and joy all about them modern 
men present at such a gathering would find 
themselves longing for a poverty of the Spirit. 
But there were, after all, definite marks of 
order in these gatherings from the first. To 
begin with, each man who became a Christian 
was baptized. Baptism and the Spirit could not 
long be separated. Which usually preceded the 
other is not so clear as that either one led to 
the other or that they were coincident. There 
may have been unbaptized Christians, but we 
do not hear of any. There is no doubt that we 
should have regarded those who desired bap- 
tism after hearing the preaching of the gospel 
by Paul as Christians before they received it, 
but there is more doubt as to their own feelings 
on the matter. Then there was also a meal 
together ; at first this meal may have been eaten 
to appease hunger, but by the time of Paul 
such a motive was regarded as blasphemous. 
In Corinth from the very beginning — and 
Corinth is a fairly early church — the meal was 
regarded not as a supper but as a rite. Very 
soon, moreover, we hear of almsgiving in the 
churches. This may have been exclusively a 
matter between individuals at the first ; we can 
only say that our earliest sources indicate 
that it soon came to be a church matter. Chris- 
tian communities were asked for gifts as com- 

36 



The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 

munities and managed their gifts as communi- 
ties. Now I suppose that if we had ashed the 
early Christians why they baptized and cele- 
brated the supper of the Lord and managed 
their finances carefully, they would have attrib- 
uted these marks of order to the Spirit, but 
whether they were asked that question — by 
others or themselves — is not quite clear. Sohm, 
who seems sure that they were, draws a picture 
of the early church which is not impressionistic 
enough to be accurate, I think; the lines are 
all filled in, as though the early Christians were 
alive to the logical inferences that a modern 
German might draw from their fundamental 
premises. It is certain that Paul believed that 
the quiet ministries of Christians were gifts of 
the spirit, 1 but we cannot be sure that he was 
not consciously endeavoring to persuade the 
Corinthians of that fact. At Corinth certainly 
" spiritual " and " ecstatic' ' had pretty much 
the same connotation; yet even in impetuous 
and enthusiastic Corinth, there were church 
poor and therefore church finances, there was 
crying need for orderly procedure in the Chris- 
tian gatherings and there were set Christian 
rites. Even in Corinth, therefore, avenues of 
development toward the bishopric were open. 

But if there were bishops in Corinth, they 
played so small a part that Paul does not even 
mention them or appeal to them in a case of 
flagrant immorality for x which he demanded 

i 1 Cor. 12 : 8, 28. 

37 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

church discipline, about 25 years after Christ's 
death. We do well to think of the early 
church there as a democracy with the Spirit 
as an extra-constitutional monarch. But only 
six or seven years later, we find Paul address- 
ing a letter to ' ' the church at Philippi with its 
bishops and deacons." 2 Whether or not the 
church at Philippi was lacking in prophets and 
speakers with tongues, we cannot say ; it would 
seem strange for a church of that time and 
place in the first years of discipleship to be 
altogether without them; but at Philippi, at 
any rate, in the year 56 a.d. it was the proph- 
ets and not the bishops that were found un- 
necessary to mention, while the bishops were 
singled out with the deacons as the proper per- 
sons to whom Paul should direct his letter. 
Thus early do we find in prominent place the 
bishops of a Christian church. It is our task 
to find why they rose to prominence and what 
turned prominence into authoritative control. 
After many years of research, the leading 
scholars have settled upon the three more or- 
dered features of early church life, to which I 
have already alluded, as marking out the main 
avenues of development from the primitive 
Christian democracy to the authoritative bishop 
of the middle of the third century. They usu- 
ally emphasize one of the three at the expense 
of the others, but the three leading avenues 
from democracy under the Spirit to episcopacy 

2 Phil. 1:1. 

38 



The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 

under Eome are, first, the care of the church 
finances, second, the moderatorship of the 
church meetings, and third, exclusive rights in 
the Eucharist. Among our modern scholars 
Hatch is the name we associate with the first 
avenue, Liitgert with the second and Sohm with 
the third. 

That the unexciting matter of church finances 
played an important part in the early Chris- 
tian communities can scarcely be doubted. The 
first real crime recorded in the Acts of the 
Apostles as committed in church circles is the 
financial deceit of Ananias and Sapphira, and 
the love of money it seems was the root not 
only of the first sin but also of the first election 
in the church at Jerusalem. Seven men had to 
be chosen to see that Greeks and Hebrews ob- 
tained their proper shares of the daily minis- 
tration. The epochal conference in Jerusalem 
concerning Gentile Christianity seems to have 
insisted that whereas the Jews had imparted 
spiritual goods to the Gentiles, the Gentiles 
should impart material goods to the Jews. In 
the midst of crucial matters, personal and 
moral, Paul urged the duty of this financial 
contribution upon his Gentile churches and was 
writing friendly letters about the messengers 
who had been chosen to collect it. 3 Almsgiving 
was one of the leading Christian virtues as it 
had been one of the leading Jewish ones. "The 
Teaching of the Apostles," written at about 

3 Cf. 2 Cor. 8 : 18-24; 9 : 1-15; Gal. 2 : 10; Rom. 15 : 25-29. 

39 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

the turn of the first century, devotes its initial 
chapter to this matter. And so when Paul ad- 
dresses his letter to the Philippians to the 
bishops and deacons of the church to express 
his thanks for the church's generous contribu- 
tion to his material needs in prison, some say 
that it was because those officers had gathered 
it. Furthermore, Hatch presents evidence — 
perhaps somewhat meager for quite so sweep- 
ing an assertion — to prove "that the officers of 
administration and finance of non-Christian 
organizations of Asia Minor and Syria were 
chiefly known" either by the title of "epime- 
letes" (caretaker) or of "episcopos" (over- 
seer). 4 It is clear that administrative officers 
of municipalities and standing committees and 
permanent commissioners of government were 
known as episcopoi "bishops." And it may 
well be — though we can say no more than that 
— that the title "bishop" was introduced into 
the early church because the function of its 
bearer was administrative and financial, as it 
was in Greek communities and in the Septuagint 
usage. The financial status of the early Chris- 
tians and the growing necessity for Christian 
workers soon made the offering for the poor 
one of the chief functions of Christian worship. 
In a famous passage of his Apology, Justin 
Martyr describes in detail the collection of the 
offerings of the people at the Eucharist and 

4 Edwin Hatch: The Organization of the Early Christian Churches, pp. 
36-87. 

40 



The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 

their presentation to the Christian who pre- 
sided at this feast. 5 "The Teaching of the 
Apostles" advises the appointment of bishops 
and deacons to perform the service of lacking 
prophets and teachers, and as this advice is 
given just after directions regarding the eu- 
charistic meal, it is fair to suppose that "The 
Teaching" means these bishops and deacons 
to preside over that rite and to collect the cus- 
tomary offerings there made. 6 And there can 
be no doubt that as a matter of fact the bishop 
had control of these offerings at the beginning 
of the third century. 7 

All this makes it very probable that we are 
following no blind alley when we regard a 
bishop as a financial and administrative 
"officer" of the early Christians. Finance is 
certainly one of the avenues which led from 
democracy to episcopacy. But important as 
finance is, is there anything in finance to create 
a sacred order of clergy, from which the entire 
laity is excluded? Church Treasurers are im- 
portant now and they were more important in 
the early days, but when we think of the 
prophets and the teachers, of the apostles and 
martyrs, of the body of elders from which the 
bishops were chosen, and of the administration 
of the sacred rites of baptism and the Eucharist, 
it seems scarcely possible that church treas- 
urers should have obtained an exclusive right 

5 Apology. Chapter 67. 

6 Teaching of the Apostles. Sec. 15. 

7 Cf. Sohm: Kirchenrecht, pp. 70, 75 and notes. 

41 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

to appoint their own successors and to domi- 
nate the life of the churches. It is indeed true — 
and I marvel that New Testament scholars have 
not impressed us more with its significance — 
that even in Paul's time, the gifts of the spirit 
seem to have been regarded as given to indi- 
vidual Christians for their life-time or at least 
during their good behavior. The gift of 
prophecy made the man who received it not a 
mere recipient of the gift of prophecy, but 
a prophet; the gift of teaching made a man a 
teacher and so on. It is, I suppose, possible 
that, the gift of managing finances made a man 
a treasurer — a "bishop," if you please — for 
life, and a bishop by divine appointment. But 
others would have had divine appointment for 
more weighty and spiritual duties, and the as- 
sent of the whole church would probably have 
been necessary for the employment and demon- 
stration of the gift of caring for the church 
moneys. It seems, to say the least, improbable 
that the oversight of church moneys should 
have been the only cause or even the main 
cause for the creation of the Christian hier- 
archy. 

The second avenue from spiritual democracy 
or theocratic democracy to episcopacy lies in 
the domain of public order. It is perhaps well 
staked out for us by the title of one of Profes- 
sor Lutgert's interesting monographs: "The 
Conflict of Office and Spirit. " In a series of most 

42 



The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 

suggestive monographs, 8 this Halle Professor 
has sought to make clear that the chief conflict 
in the early church was not between Christianity 
and Judaism, as we would suppose, but between 
Christianity and a kind of docetic enthusiasm, 
which later became known under the name of 
Gnosticism. It appears to me that in the light 
of what Reitzenstein 9 and others have uncov- 
ered to us concerning the milieu of the early 
church, the position of Professor Liitgert is 
essentially correct. When the early Jewish 
Christians, after the death of Stephen, took 
Christianity into Asia Minor, they took it into 
a region where men were seeking to escape 
from the ills of human flesh by escaping from 
human flesh itself. This escape they made not 
by the avenue of death but by the avenue of 
religious rites. Through these mysteries they 
passed, as they supposed, from human into 
divine life and received here on earth the 
divine, deathless, invisible, untrammeled spirit. 
They treated the body with the same contempt 
which is meted out to it by the Christian Scien- 
tists of to-day. Indeed I think we shall do more 
justice both to Christian Science and to Gnos- 
ticism if we remember that they belong to the 
same genus. But there was this great differ- 
ence between our case and theirs. The church 
has formed the atmosphere into which Chris- 

8 Freiheitspredigt u. Schwarmgeister in Korinth 1908. Die Vollkommenen 
in Philipperbrief und die Enthusiasten in Thessalonich 1909. Die Irrlehrer 
der Pastor albriefe 1909. 

9 Die hellenistischen Mysterien-Religionen. 

43 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

tian Science has intruded; the mystery re- 
ligions formed the atmosphere into which 
Christianity intruded. What wonder if a great 
body of early Gentile disciples, hearing Paul's 
earnest proclamation of freedom from the Jew- 
ish law and freedom in the Spirit of God, should 
have regarded Christianity as a means of 
bringing them into that blessed realm of the 
spirit where sin had no entrance and where 
"the resurrection was past already," 10 by new 
mysterious rites and by a more miracle-work- 
ing spirit than any which Egypt or Persia could 
produce. It is because we no longer ignore the 
world of the first century in our reading of the 
New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers that 
we see in the condition of the Corinthian 
church, at the time Paul wrote his letters to it, 
a sort of cross-section of early Christianity as 
a whole. This much at least may certainly be 
said. In Corinth, at about the year 50 a.d., dis- 
order, due to ecstasies of the Spirit, prevailed 
at the gatherings of Christians. 11 The infalli- 
ble sign of Christ's presence was the gift of 
tongues, as the event narrated in the second 
chapter of Acts bears witness. At Philippi, 
about the year 58, there were those who re- 
garded themselves as "perfect." 12 Not so 
much later, perhaps, as we have been led to 
believe, we hear in the Pastoral Letters of the 
presence of those who proclaim that "the resur- 



10 2 Tim. 2 : 18. 

11 See particularly 1 Cor. 11. 

12 Phil. 3 : 15. 



44 



The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 

rection is past already. ' ' 13 At the turn of the 
Century a long section of the Epistle of 
Clement might be considered irrelevant, unless 
the writer were tactfully appealing to those in 
Corinth who disbelieved the resurrection, as 
they had disbelieved it at an earlier time. 14 
Early in the second century we hear from the 
"Teaching of the Apostles" that prophets were 
given to having visions which accrued to their 
own material comfort, and from the Second 
Letter of Peter that new-made converts were 
seduced by those who promised them liberty 
while they themselves were slaves of cor- 
ruption. 15 Ignatius, ait about the same time, 
in the letter to the Trallians, avers dis- 
tinctly that there are those who affirm 
both that they themselves are mere sem- 
blance and that Christ suffered in sem- 
blance only. 16 We have only to mention the 
Words, Gnosticism, Montanism, Marcionism, to 
call before us the extent and the longevity of 
enthusiastic and extravagant movements in the 
Christian church. Now there can be no doubt 
that the staid and sober sort of people in the 
Christian church who from the beginning had 
"despised prophecy" 17 would increase in the 
face of the extravagances of those who as late 
as the "Teaching of the Apostles" had to be 

« 2 Tim. 2 : 18. 

14 Clement to the Corinthians. Sec. 24-26. 

15 2 Pet. 2 : 19. 

i 6 Ignatius: Epistle to the Trallians. Sec. 10. 
17 1 Thess. 5 : 20. 

45 ! 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

cautioned not to despise bishops. 18 The char- 
acter of the time allows us to have great sym- 
pathy with those who opposed the Christian 
liberty which Paul proclaimed — and to revere 
even more deeply that great apostle, who in- 
sisted that that liberty was not a liberty unto 
the flesh but the liberty of the humble, minister- 
ing, childlike, loving spirit of Christ. As time 
went on the elders of the community would 
more and more vigorously assert themselves 
against the youthful or newly converted enthu- 
siasts. The connotation of this word " elder" 
is not as clear as we would wish, but whether 
it signifies long years of life or long years of 
church membership, in either case the influence 
of the elders would probably be cast on the side 
of order. If old in years, they would have 
grown weary even of spiritual orgies, if proud 
of their conversion by the apostles or of their 
acquaintance with traditions of the church, they 
would realize in the esoteric and exotic mys- 
tery-teachings a departure from the highest 
motives of the best and most substantial Chris- 
tians. From this group of elders, the bishops 
were always taken. In Philippi, at any rate, 
and probably in a very wide area there were 
several bishops in a church. Perhaps it was 
simply another name for elder at first ; it came 
gradually however to be applied to that elder 
who presided at the church meeting and who 
therefore, as we have seen, received the church 

18 Teaching of the Apostles. Sec. 15. 

46 



The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 

offerings. Doubtless then as now the older 
men had usually more to give than the young 
and more wisdom in its distribution. And in 
spite of the enthusiasts there was a reverence 
for experience and age in those days greater 
than in ours. The group of elders commonly 
dominated the gatherings of the churches and 
the older churches instinctively took the same 
attitude of authority to the newer churches that 
the older Christians took to the newer Chris- 
tians. The bishops, then the bishop, gradually 
became their spokesman, the representative to 
those outside as well as to those within, of 
established and ancient and orthodox Chris- 
tianity. Soon the bishops came to be regarded 
as the sacred representatives of the apostles. 
Even "The Acts of the Apostles" informs us 
that the apostles appointed elders in every 
church* — at least about Lystra, Iconium and 
Antioch. 19 Clement confirms this, only substi- 
tuting bishops and deacons for elders, and 
affirms that such appointment was prophesied 
by Isaiah who said: "I will appoint their 
bishops in righteousness and their deacons in 
faith." 20 Regarding their appointment as go- 
ing back thus pretty well to the beginning of 
things and as the goal of the divine will, it 
is no wonder that he regarded the church 
of Corinth as guilty of "no light sin for 
thrusting out those who had offered the 
gifts of the bishops' office holily." For we 

is Acts 14 : 23. 

20 To the Corinthians. Sec. 42. 

47 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

read in his letter: "Our apostles knew through 
the Lord that there would be strife over the 
name of the bishop's office. For ;this cause, 
therefore, having received complete foreknowl- 
edge, they appointed the aforesaid and after- 
wards they provided a continuance, that if 
these should fall asleep, other approved men 
should succeed to their ministration. Those 
who were appointed by them or afterwards by 
men of repute with the consent of the whole 
church — these men we consider to be unjustly 
ejected." 21 The ending is somewhat lame, it 
is true, but surely the passage prepares us for 
the unblushing declarations of the great bishop 
Ignatius on his way to martyrdom — of which 
repeated declarations these samples must suf- 
fice. "We ought to regard the bishop as the 
Lord Himself." 22 "Be ye zealous to do all 
things in godly concord, the bishop presiding 
after the likeness of God and the presbyters 
after the likeness of the council of the apostles 
with the deacons also who are most dear to 
me. ' ' 23 It was only about forty or fifty years 
later that Irenaeus could point to the apostolic 
churches as sure repositories of Christian doc- 
trine, because their bishops were in direct 
and continuous succession from the apostles. 24 
Curiously enough we have a close parallel to 
the apostolic succession of Christian bishops 

21 To the Corinthians. Sec. 44- 

22 Epistle to the Ephesians. Sec. 6. 

23 Epistle to the Magnesians. Sec. 6. 

24 The Writings of Irenaeus (Ante-Nicene Library), Vol. I, pp. 260-264* 

48 



The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 

in the Mosaic succession of Jewish Rabbis. In 
the Midrasch to Genesis, from about the sixth 
century, we read that Moses imparted the Holy 
Ghost to the Elders of Israel without lessening 
his own supply and that from that time on 
each teacher had lit his torch from his prede- 
cessor. Weber informs us from his studies in 
the Talmud that this lighting of the torch refers 
to the ceremony of ordination. It is indeed 
distinctly said in Sanhedrin 14 that in the time 
of Hadrian the last famous teacher had or- 
dained five elders for the express purpose of 
preserving the succession of the Spirit. 25 In 
the third century the Mechilta proclaims that 
to receive a Rabbi means to receive the Shekina 
of God. And the practice of the Jews, so thor- 
oughly in accord with this theory, is proof 
enough that something much akin to apostolic 
succession gave to the Jewish Rabbi the author- 
ity and standing of a Christian bishop. As the 
theory was developed much at the same time 
as that of the apostolic succession, it is pre- 
sumable that even the Jews were not free from 
the extravagant teachings of spirit-filled enthu- 
siasts and that Mosaic succession like apostolic 
succession was the refuge of the orthodox. But 
there is one essential distinction between the 
Jewish and the Christian situations. The 
whole atmosphere of late Judaism was legalis- 
tic ; the Thora was the authority and the keep- 
ing of it the way to salvation. In the Gentile 

25 Ferdinand Weber: System der Altsynagogalen Paldstinischen Theologie 
p. 123. 

49 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

Christian churches, though from the first there 
were always those who regarded the Gospel as 
the new law, Christianity had arisen as a life 
given by a risen Lord, had put down the move- 
ment for all external standards, and was 
marked by a joy and a vitality altogether 
foreign to the remnant of the Jews. Before 
therefore we attempt to explain the authority 
of the bishops from their function as pre- 
servers of order, by moderating in meetings of 
enthusiasts and by deciding about doctrine, we 
must turn to the third avenue from democracy 
to episcopacy and examine the rights of the 
pastor or bishop at the Eucharist. 

If at any point we long for full records of 
the early church, it is regarding its conception 
of the Lord's Supper and its customary cele- 
bration thereof. And nowhere are the records 
so meager. It will take us less time than we 
wish to record the facts regarding the connec- 
tion of the bishop with the Eucharist. From 
Paul's counsel to the Corinthians, "Wherefore, 
my brethren, when ye come together to eat (the 
Lord's Supper), wait one for another," 26 it is 
clear that no one in particular was designated 
to preside at the feast and to offer the thanks- 
giving; various groups of Christians partook 
at their convenience. At the time of Justin, 
as we have seen, there was one who presided, 
who received the offerings and who later dis- 
tributed them to the poor. In the Teaching of 

**1 Cor. 11: 83. 

50 



The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 

the Apostles a prescribed prayer of thanks- 
giving at the Eucharist is given in full and then 
we read: "But permit the prophets to offer 
thanksgiving as much as they desire." 27 And 
Justin tells us that to pronounce the thanks- 
giving was the privilege of the presiding of- 
ficer. 28 In this same document, immediately 
after the directions for the Eucharist, the 
churches are counselled to elect bishops and 
deacons, and not to despise them, for they can 
perform the service of prophets and teachers. 29 
Ignatius commands: Let that be held a valid 
Eucharist which is under the bishop or one to 
whom he shall have committed it. 30 From that 
time on the language regarding the bishops be- 
comes more and more priestly in tone. In the 
Teaching of the Apostles we are told that the 
prophets are the chief priests of the Christian 
and are to receive the first-fruits, and that if 
there be no prophets in any church, the first- 
fruits are to go to the poor. 31 But from the 
time of Ignatius, the bishops, who took the 
place of the prophets at the Eucharist, are more 
and more addressed as priests and given 
control of the alms of the church, until we hear 
Cyprian speaking of the bishops constantly and 
naturally as the priests of God. 32 These are 

27 Teaching of the Apostles. Sec. 10. 

28 Apology. Chapter 67. 

29 Teaching of the Apostles. Sec. 15. 

30 To the Smyrnaeans. Sec. 8. 

31 Teaching of the Apostles. Sec. 18. 

32 Writings of Cyprian (Ante-Nicene Library), Vol. I, pp. 120, 164, %%6> 
243, etc. On the whole subject cf. Sohm: Kirchenrecht, Vol. I, pp. 66-69, 
205-211. 

51 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

meager facts, but I think they justify us in 
saying that strong as was the desire for order 
and unity in the early church, and powerful as 
was the pastor or bishop as the official expres- 
sion of that desire, it was only after he had 
obtained the exclusive right of presiding (or 
designating him who should preside) at the 
Eucharist that he became set apart from his 
brethren and by virtue of an ordination, in 
which the people had no share, received the Holy 
Spirit for the performance of an essentially 
priestly sacrifice in the Eucharist. In the words 
of Professor Allen: "The separation between 
clergy and laity (the authority for the clergy 
coming from a source external to the people) 
was deepened into an impassable barrier by 
Cyprian's doctrine of the sacerdotal character 
of the ministry. ' ' 33 

If we are right then in coming to the conclu- 
sion that the main avenue from democracy to 
episcopacy runs through the eucharist, and that 
it was because of the function of the bishop and 
his associates here, that there grew up a fatal 
and irretrievable class distinction in the Chris- 
tian church, it remains for us to estimate the 
Christian character of the Eucharist, to in- 
quire as to its meaning for the early church, 
and the source or at least the milieu from 
which that meaning came. Here again our 
sources are meager, though somewhat more 
clear than on the connection of the bishop with 

33 Christian Institutions, p. 124. 

52 



The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 

the feast. The Corinthian Christians, appar- 
ently in harmony with other Gentile Christians, 
believed that the bread and wine gave them the 
same fellowship with the body and blood of 
Christ that their heathen contemporaries in the 
various mystery-religions believed themselves 
to possess with their divinities through similar 
rites. 34 Paul himself undoubtedly believed that 
because the body of Christ, obtainable in the 
sacrament, had not been properly reverenced 
and received, some Corinthian Christians were 
smitten with disease and others with death. 35 
Out of many similar utterances of Ignatius I 
select these as the clearest indications of his 
belief: "Breaking one bread, which is the medi- 
cine of immortality and the antidote that one 
should not die but live for ever in Jesus 
Christ." 36 "Be ye careful therefore (for the 
avoidance of schism) to observe one Eucharist 
for there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ 
and one cup of union with his blood, there is one 
altar, as there is one bishop." 37 "They ab- 
stain from Eucharist and prayer because they 
allow not that the Eucharist is the flesh of our 
Saviour, Jesus Christ, which flesh suffered for 
our sins and which the Father of His goodness 
raised up. ' ' 38 There can therefore be but little 
doubt that from a very early time in the Chris- 
tian church many of the converts believed that 

34 1 Cor. 10 : 14-22. 

3 5 Ibid. 11 :S0. 

36 Ephesians 20. 

37 Philadelphians 4> 

38 Smyrnaeans 6. 

53 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

in partaking of the Lord's Supper, they were 
being nourished on the transformed and immor- 
tal flesh and blood of Christ. 

Our final question is: From whence came 
this idea, final founder of the Christian clergy, 
eventual materializer of our faith? 

In this age, it is certainly unnecessary to 
show how foreign the conception is to the 
thought of Jesus. Neither would it have arisen 
by a misunderstanding of the scene in the upper 
room or as a re-enactment of a passover-feast 
among men who were constantly expecting the 
return of their Lord from the skies. "Whence 
then did this feasting on the immortal body of 
Jesus come to muddy the transparent living 
water of the Gospel? After what has been said 
regarding the prominent part played by the 
mystery-religions in the atmosphere of the 
early church, the answer is not difficult. In his 
brochure on "Baptism and the Eucharist in the 
Primitive Church" Heitmuller has collected 
certain interesting analogies between the Eu- 
charist of the Church and the sacred meals of 
the mysteries. In these religious associations 
he tells us that common meals in honor of the 
god or of the founder or of a deceased patron 
play a prominent part. Just as Paul speaks 
of the table of the Lord, so the devotees of the 
heathen mysteries speak of the table of the 
Lord Serapis or of the God Herakles. To 
quote: "Men longed for purity and pardon, for 
immortality and divine life and for their mate- 

54 



The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 

rial guarantees. The mysteries supplied them 
in all sorts of ceremonies. We happen to know 
of two mystery-religions in the very territory 
of the missionary activity of Paul, which pro- 
vided sacred meals for their worshippers. The 
servants of Mithras celebrated a meal consist- 
ing of bread and a cup (in this case of water) 
which had supernatural effects. The similarity 
of this meal with the Christian Eucharist was 
so striking that Justin (Martyr) averred that 
the devil had contrived it. And similarly the 
worshippers of Attis recognized a holy meal 
as the center of their mysteries. The details 
escape us, but it is certain that in the mission- 
ary territory of Paul, particularly in Syria and 
Asia Minor, the belief in the mediatiom of 
divine powers through eating and drinking was 
widespread." 39 The Lord's Supper, as the 
church of the second century understood it, was 
one of a genus that had little in common with 
Christianity. 

We are forced then, are we not, to this con- 
clusion, that the three avenues which lead from 
primitive Christian democracy or theocracy 
to mediaeval episcopacy and papacy are the con- 
trol of the finances, the regulation of undue and 
unmoral ecstasies, and the rights in a peculiarly 
divine feast. The priesthood of the bishop and 
those associated with him may have been due, 
in part, as Sohm believes, to the fact that the 

39 Heitmuller: Taufe und Abendmahl im Urchristentum , p. 73, cf. pp. 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

bishop was regarded as the steward of God, 
because he controlled the natural gifts which 
in Sohm's view were regarded as God's prop- 
erty and not as the property of the church. But 
Sohm insists that that control of God's prop- 
erty that was lodged in the bishop was a con- 
sequence of his presiding over the Eucharist. 40 
The priesthood of the bishop, too, was undoubt- 
edly prepared for by his authority in putting 
down the extravagances of those under the con- 
trol of the spirit at the church gathering, and of 
his leadership against the inroads of pagan 
mysticism. But the priesthood of the bishop 
was actually founded by the mystery of the 
Eucharist, an institution transformed frojm its 
original intent by the atmosphere of the time, 
created as that atmosphere was by the mys- 
tery-religions, from which so many of the con- 
verts came. In other words it is impossible 
for us to disguise the fact that just as the 
church was in large part founded by its perse- 
cutors, so the Christian ministry was in large 
part established as a clergy by the heathen 
religions of the first centuries. 

The basis of this institution was not Chris- 
tian, but upon that basis has been built one of 
the most splendid religious edifices ever erected 
in this world. It culminated in the Papacy and 
in the Holy Catholic Church, with its earthly 
capitol at Rome. Before it, every religious 
man should bow with greatest reverence. As 

*° Kirchenrecht, Vol. I, pp. 66-81. 

56 



The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 

time went on the bishop as the presiding officer 
of an individual church, or as we should say a 
pastor, developed into the presiding officer of 
a central church and its outstations, much as 
a missionary upon our foreign fields to-day. 
Then a bishop became a superintendent of a 
diocese and eventually, much against Cyprian's 
will, these bishops became a regular hierarchy 
with archbishops to rule it and with the Pope 
as chief priest above all. This hierarchy re- 
tained supervision over the finances of the 
churches and soon there came to be a genuine 
Catholic treasury or at least a Catholic control. 
Much more important, however, than any mat- 
ter of finance, these bishops retained their 
rights in the sacrament. Over it they presided 
or ordained those who should represent them at 
that solemn and life-giving sacrifice. There 
came thus to be a vast spiritual organization 
of the civilized world. It incarnated the great 
idea of a supreme spiritual fellowship which 
spanned all national divisions and which made 
men realize a common human life. The word 
humanity for the first time sprang into sight 
of men on a large scale. It deepened and sanc- 
tified every individual life, for each was a citi- 
zen of a vast City of God. And this human life 
common to all was no earthly life. It was an 
immortal one. And to the immortal element, 
all that was of this world was subsidiary. The 
Holy Catholic Church fixed the eyes of men 
upon their spiritual being. To it was com- 

57 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

mitted an eternal food which it could impart to 
ail men and women and children, assuring them 
of immortal bliss but also bestowing upon them 
in this present world an immortal flesh which 
should gradually transform their own. Every- 
where men were in touch with God. Every day 
His power could break forth through them into 
miraculous announcements of His presence and 
favor. No electric cars were built nor super- 
dreadnoughts, neither was sanitation or sur- 
gery in the foreground of men's attention. But 
generations of men were produced which have 
made it impossible for the generations that 
have followed and that will follow to regard 
themselves as animals and which have given 
men those motives and impulses which alone 
assure progress and vitality. And in this great 
spiritual fellowship, the men of the spirit, the 
magicians of the spirit if you choose, were the 
rulers and leaders. Monarchs and courts were 
their servants, raised up to do the lower work 
of the world, and utterly under their hands to 
bless or to ruin. The secular was subordinate 
to the spiritual, trade to religion. Never before 
and never since, until the Anabaptists rose in 
Zurich or perhaps not until the Mayflower 
sailed for Plymouth or perhaps never at all, 
has a greater ecclesiastical idea dominated the 
minds of men. For if this be indeed a spiritual 
life which we lead together, the spiritual must 
manifestly and admittedly and universally 
have charge of the material. The men who 

58 



The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 

best embody religion must control, though they 
need not manage, the affairs of men. And all 
this vast empire of the soul the Holy Catholic 
Church symbolized and in a large measure in- 
carnated. With what it deemed a historical 
and with what was an unquestioned right, it 
stood as the representative of God in the world. 
It dimly pointed to a mysterious but historic 
Christ, who had showed that the earthly life 
was only the transparent shell of the divine; 
it covered him up by his miraculous birth and 
by his cross, but those were better coverings 
than trappings of luxury and lust. It united 
and organized and spiritualized mankind. 
What wonder that it still lives to-day! What 
wonder that it looks down upon sects and 
despises less catholic and less venerable priest- 
hoods and liturgies! What wonder that from 
the throne of its high accomplishments, its un- 
dying zeal and its truly Catholic hope, it 
despises Anglican orders and exterminates 
Modernism as a doctor cuts out a mole! It 
lives because it embodies in the most visible 
and affecting form the supremacy of religion 
over animalism, and the universal and immor- 
tal fellowship of men. It insists upon and it 
visualizes the authority of conscience and God ; 
it directs the ignorant; it holds all men to- 
gether. No religious man should stand aloof 
from its mighty history, its transcendent hopes, 
its vast and permanent achievements. Like 
much other religion in the world, it is not Chris- 

59 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

tian; it must therefore be transformed and 
purified. But only when Christianity becomes 
as vast and purer, only when men live by the 
passion of Jesus as Catholics have lived by the 
passion for immortal life, only when Christian- 
ity rules our individual spirits and a multitude 
of individual spirits, as the Eoman Church 
ruled the early centuries, will Jesus see of the 
travail of his soul and be satisfied. 



60 



LECTURE III 

THE BEGINNINGS OF NATIONAL 
CHURCHES 



LECTURE III 

THE BEGINNINGS OF NATIONAL 
CHUECHES 

The great ideal which erected the papacy 
held Western Europe in a spiritual fellowship, 
almost unbroken, for centuries. Even an ex- 
treme Protestant must be awed by its strength, 
its fine accomplishment and its vaster promise. 
In so vast a fabric, he feels inclined to think 
that room for the diversest growth of individ- 
ualism might have been found. Its fall seems 
even to him a calamity and the cause of wide- 
spread disaster and confusion. The unity of 
Western civilization was endangered ; for what 
was believed to be Christendom the nation was 
substituted as object of allegiance and pro- 
tector of rights. While through the fall of the 
Papacy, religious thought became freer, re- 
ligion itself from being regarded as the mis- 
tress of the world became the arm of the state. 
The price we paid for the freedom of the mind 
was the secularisation not only of the State but 
of the Church. 

It is our present task to trace the rise of 
what seems to me the most inadequate of all 
the historical forms of church organization, 
the church of a delimited nation. 

63 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

I desire, perhaps somewhat arbitrarily, to 
limit my subject. I do not think that the Roman 
Catholic or Greek Catholic churches properly 
fall under the caption of National Churches. 
That they were in official relation with the State 
is undeniable, but the State with which they 
were related was not delimited ; ideally and dog- 
matically speaking, the State was Catholic in 
character and made some pretension at being 
world-wide in its scope. We are not consider- 
ing the principle of Establishment, per se, but 
of a limited national establishment. But I also 
desire to exclude from consideration the an- 
cient Eastern Churches, both because their his- 
tory would take us far afield from our own 
immediate interests and also because these 
churches did not definitely fall away from a 
universal church for the sake of establishing 
a narrow, national organization. The Arme- 
nian Church existed as a national church from 
its inception and other eastern churches arose 
on doctrinal grounds, becoming national only 
incidentally and perhaps somewhat gradually. 
What I desire to consider is the formation of 
Protestant churches which consciously split 
off from a larger whole and which took shape 
according to the boundaries of their civil 
governments. 

We Americans have never been conscious of 
much exaggeration in Longfellow's familiar 
lines upon our country: 

64 



The Beginnings of the National Churches 

" Humanity with all its fears, 
With all the hopes of future years, 
Is hanging breathless on thy fate! 
Our hearts, our hopes are all with thee, 
Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, 
Our faith triumphant o'er our fears, 
Are all with thee, are all with thee ! " 

But surely if there was ever a human insti- 
tution to which without apparent blasphemy 
these words could be addressed it was the Holy 
Catholic Church of the West with its high tra- 
ditions, its glorious cathedrals, its rich litera- 
ture, its sacred liturgy, its noble saints, its 
effective and proven organization. Only a 
combination of the strongest causes could have 
produced its fall. Only in an upheaval of 
Christian civilization could the most precious 
structure of the ages perish. In the time at 
our disposal it is possible only to mention in 
the briefest fashion four great grounds of its 
fall. 

The first, of course, is the manifest disloyalty 
of the leaders of the Church to their sublime 
ideal. The ideal was too large for men to sup- 
port. The Popes instead of seeking to serve 
the Ideal sought to make the Ideal serve the 
most narrow and trivial of interests. More 
compelling than the sublimity of their vast 
Ideal was the affection that bound them to 
their kin, the lust that drew them to their for- 
bidden offspring, the love of luxury that sub- 
stituted splendor for purity. In support of 

65 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

this assertion we have only time to cite a very 
few instances from the long catalogue which 
Henry C. Lea has so laboriously gathered. 
Sixtus IV bestowed upon a nephew of his not 
only an archbishopric but at the same time 
seven bishoprics and two abbacies. To another 
nephew, a Cardinal and a libertine, he gave 
a group of bishoprics yielding 60,000 ducats 
a year (the actual value of the gold in the 
coin being over $125,000). He pawned his 
sacred tiara for gold and redeemed it by creat- 
ing 18 new secretaries, and forcing each one to 
pay him 2,600 florins. Leo X, Luther ? s Pope, 
appointed 60 chamberlains from whom he ex- 
acted in payment for their offices 74,000 ducats. 
The holder of every benefice throughout Eu- 
rope was forced to return a stipulated sum to 
the Pope who, for ease of collection, employed 
the Fugger banking house at Augsburg for 50 
per cent, of the total. Confessors in the Hos- 
pital of San Giovanni on almost indisputable 
authority are said to have notified the physi- 
cians of the wealth of their various patients, 
the richest of whom were systematically pois- 
oned. Innocent VIII and Alexander VI gave 
public Weddings for their own illegitimate 
daughters. Concubinage of the priests was 
quite universal. Large sums of money for 
crusades against the infidel, purchased by the 
sale of indulgences, which guaranteed freedom 
from criminal prosecution here as well as from 
purgatorial pains hereafter, were applied to 

66 



The Beginnings of the National Churches 

current expenses of the Papal court and the 
aggrandizement of the Papal families. It is 
not strange that nepotism, the form of family 
enrichment which is most in favor with sup- 
posedly childless clergy, has become the best 
known word to describe the most shameless 
graft. But we must take only so much further 
time as is necessary to outline the career of 
the son of Rene II, Duke of Lorraine. At three 
years of age, he was appointed coadjutor to his 
uncle, the Bishop of Metz. At ten years of age 
he succeeded to the bishopric. He resigned it 
after a while in favor of his own nephew, aged 
four. At nineteen, he became also Bishop of 
Toul and at twenty Bishop of Terouanne also 
and Cardinal by grace of the Pope. In the next 
five years he added three more bishoprics, in- 
cluding that of Verdun. His avarice still un- 
satisfied, he became Archbishop of Narbonne, 
Reims and Lyons without resigning any of his 
bishoprics. Truly catholic in his tastes, he 
added thirteen abbeys to his rule. His ex- 
travagances throughout life were so great that 
notwithstanding his large income he was al- 
ways poor. 1 When we consider that these vari- 
ous offices assigned to papal favorites were 
often farmed out to the highest bidder, who in 
his turn auctioned off his pile of sacred offices, 
we can understand how to the people who paid 
dear for heartless services the Church began 

l For these and similar facts, cf. Cambridge Modern History, Vol. I. 
Chapter XIX. 

67 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

to be the exploiter instead of the sanctifier of 
the religious life of men, a splendid burden 
instead of a liberator and savior. Had the 
Church insisted upon being the friend of men, 
I do not, for one, believe that the Christian 
Revolution would have been possible. 

The second, though quite subordinate, cause 
of the fall of the Catholic Church was that large 
movement for the advancement of the human 
intellect and for the release of the spontaneity 
of the human heart that the word Renaissance 
is employed to cover. Its center was, of course, 
the discovery of the classics of the Greeks and 
Romans. Here, before the Church or its Lord 
had ever worked upon the hearts of men, there 
was unexpectedly exhibited to the world, that 
had begun to feel the bondage of the church, a 
pure delight in nature and in the development 
of human character and of human society that 
was astounding. The high ideals of the human 
mind in Plato and Virgil and Cicero and Seneca 
and the joy and nobility of heart that their 
writings evinced, the largeness and childlike- 
ness of Homer, the glimpses at the beauty and 
charm of the antique world, all made the per- 
haps unacknowledged appeal of a freer, glad- 
der day to men suddenly aware of living in 
prison. The leaders of the Church and of the 
Universities abandoned themselves almost 
without reserve to the earthly Paradise of 
which they seemed to catch a first vision and 
men began to be bound together on high levels 

68 



The Beginnings of the National Churches 

of feeling by ties which had absolutely no con- 
nection with Christ or the Church. The life 
thus revealed seemed more full of promise and 
delight than any which their religion had ever 
offered them. Human nature did not seem as 
evil as the Church had found it or perchance 
even had maintained it. It could be trusted 
as well as the divine instruction of the priest; 
it needed expansion more than redemption. 
With the discovery of the Classics went also the 
discovery of the Early Fathers and the in- 
evitable conviction spread abroad that the 
church of the primitive days and the majestic 
and debauched institution of their time had 
but very little in common. In the famous anony- 
mous dialogue of Peter and Pope Julius, the 
Pope is represented as shuddering at the very 
thought of being "reduced to the level of the 
Apostles." 2 The freedom of the intellectual 
air and the dawning perception of the worth 
of an individual human being, made men 
wonder if the Church were a refuge or a 
prison, the guide or the seducer of the spirit. 
Mere distrust of the Church, however, would 
not have produced her ruin. She stood for too 
vital an element in human life for that. Match- 
ing these two negative influences there were at 
least two constructive forces at work which 
assured her terrible chastisement. The first 
of these, of course, was the individual religious 
experience of Martin Luther. 

2 Froude: Life and Letters of Erasmus, p. 158. 

69 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

Into this sublime event in the history of man- 
kind it is neither possible nor necessary to 
enter. At nearly every one of the vital turning- 
points in the organization of the Church, there 
stands a personal revelation of God. Behind 
the founding of the Church stands the experi- 
ence of Jesus with God; with the deliberate 
freeing of the Church from racial limitations 
there stands connected the experience of Paul 
with God ; sanctifying the arrogance of the bish- 
opric stands the experience of Ignatius with 
God and with death ; as a commentary upon the 
rise of Catholicism there stands the experience 
of Augustine with God, and behind its fall, the 
experience of Luther with God. I do not mean 
that these personal experiences were equally 
determinative of the outer movements of the 
church; but the personal character of our re- 
ligion manifests itself in the fact that at these 
vast turns in its historical course we find the 
supporting strength of the revelation of God in 
the soul of an individual man. Of all these per- 
sonal experiences, the experience of Luther was 
most patently and immediately determinative 
of a change in the organization of religion. The 
experience of Jesus, as we have seen, though, 
of course, standing behind the founding of the 
Church, stood a good distance behind it; the 
experience of Paul occurred after the first steps 
in the formation of a Church, untrammeled by 
the Jewish State; the experience of Augnstine 
also was a reinforcement of a movement al- 

70 



The Beginnings of the National Churches 

ready under way, though a reinforcement of 
determinative power; but the experience of 
Luther was at once translated into the sphere 
of Church organization by Luther himself. 
The experience of God in his own soul was to 
him so authoritative and unquestionable and 
satisfying, that it was impossible to modify or 
obscure or support it by the holiest traditions 
of the Church. What the Church was in the 
world to do for men, God had done for him in 
the church but apart from its supposedly indis- 
pensable organization. He believed that his 
experience of God was in harmony with these 
other personal revelations of God to which I 
have referred, but there was nothing about any 
of them that depended upon the consent of the 
Eoman Catholic or Greek Catholic Churches; 
the church organization could not therefore be 
regarded as essential to the revelation of God 
in the soul of man and the redemption of man 
by the Spirit of God. "What," he says, "is 
the entire gospel other than the good tidings 
of the forgiveness of sins? . . . Neither the 
Pope nor Bishop nor any man has the right to 
command a Christian even by a syllable with- 
out his consent. ? ' 3 After his experience with 
God, he knew how divine a thing a Christian 
was. It was to him a blasphemy that any one 
who, through the will of God, had obtained the 
freedom of a Christian should be controlled 



3 Von der Babylonischen Gefangenschaft der Kirche. See Rade's Luther, 
Vol. I, pp. 689, 692. 

71 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

even by so holy an institution as the Church. 
A man who, free from sin and care and death, 
could commune with God as a child with a 
father, had escaped from the Babylonish Cap- 
tivity of Rome. When Luther summarized the 
two parts of the gladdest Christian book ever 
written thus: "A Christian is an absolutely 
free lord of all things and subject to no man. 
A Christian is an absolutely bounden servant 
of all things and subject to every man," 4 he 
laid grounds deep enough and revolutionary 
enough to make inevitable the establishment 
of a new Christian fellowship in the world. If 
any human words are worthy to be set along- 
side of the two commandments of Jesus, those 
words of Luther must be chosen. What God 
wrought in the soul of a miner's son rent the 
Christian Church in twain and made inevitable 
the freedom and fellowship in which we stand. 

By no means so important as this experience 
of Martin Luther with God, but more deter- 
minative of the form of the organization which 
this experience produced than the experience 
itself, was the last of the four causes of the 
Papacy's fall. It is the most important for 
our purpose and therefore upon it we must now 
concentrate our attention ; I refer to the growth 
of national consciousness. 

Even the noble ideal of the Papacy had never 
been able to repress the consciousness of dif- 

4 Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen. See Rade's Luther, Vol. I, p. 
721. 

72 



The Beginnings of the National Churches 

f erence of racial temperament, racial needs and 
racial aspirations in its wide domain. Schism 
was always dreaded and often met by it. And 
yet at times it seemed as if the world were but 
a body for the Roman soul. The Latin lan- 
guage became the universal language of schol- 
arship, of inter-communication between all 
classes of divers races, of worship. Men really 
began to do their thinking in a medium which 
required no translation; it looked as if the 
world of thought were really to be one. Peas- 
ants everywhere began to be accustomed to its 
sound in worship and to regard it as the lan- 
guage of devotion and of the angels. Their 
rulers used the language and relied upon the 
authority of Rome. These rulers were not 
kings but satraps ; they each kept order for the 
viceregent of Christ and for the strengthening 
of His kingdom against the infidels. Usually 
they ruled only over small areas, lived without 
pomp, and divided their time pretty equally 
between the chase of beasts and the repression 
of brigands. Everywhere the presence of the 
priest told of a higher power and often the 
presence of monks that of greater luxury. Eu- 
rope seemed indeed to be, if not a common- 
wealth of man, at least a federation of the 
world. Eome, as a court of last resort, ante- 
dates the Hague Tribunal. It promulgated de- 
cisions, even if they were but rarely enforced. 

But gradually this state of affairs became 
threatened by clashing interests of large num- 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

bers of people. Loyalties arose which came 
into conflict with the loyalty to the head of the 
Church. The growth of a kind of dawning 
nationalism is hard to trace; there is appar- 
ently no adequate treatment of this subject ex- 
tant; we must simply indicate some factors in 
its rise. 

And certainly a most important factor in the 
growth of national consciousness is the enlarg- 
ing of the areas of secular control. In order 
to keep the peace, the knights or barons of a 
neighborhood combined together. After a long 
time, there came to be a federation or confed- 
eration or principality or kingdom in place of 
a smaller unit of territory. Or an elected king 
would really make his power felt in the terri- 
tory over which he held only theoretic rights 
before. Then the prince or king would become 
a sufficiently great figure to appeal to the imag- 
inations of men, and he would deliberately em- 
phasize the peculiar need of his own territory 
over against the interests of territories near by 
and over against the advantage of Christendom 
as a whole. The Pope began to be regarded in 
Germany and England and even in France not 
as the Father of the people but as a foreign 
monarch, ruling over a distant realm and intent 
on the interests of the region near his papal 
seat. The Bishops seemed much more con- 
cerned with their own personal standing at 
Rome than with the condition of their own 
peoples. The prince, at least, strengthened the 

74 



The Beginnings of the National Churches 

section over which he ruled and expended his 
wealth among his own people; the bishop for- 
warded the taxes of the church in great part 
to Rome and frow r ned upon the growing feel- 
ing of independence among the subjects and at 
the court of great princes. The common man 
began to feel that his interests were not identi- 
cal with the interests of Christendom and that 
his interests must first be met. The ideal of 
the Papacy was too vast and vague for men; 
though still far from even dreaming of Hegel 's 
conception of the National State as the king- 
dom of heaven upon earth, they began to feel 
that the needs of localities differed and that 
the needs must be met by the people of the 
localities themselves. 

The rise of the Mohammedan power and its 
conquest of Constantinople and the discovery 
of America and its colonization served to em- 
phasize the divergent interests and powers of 
the nations and to destroy that unity of feeling 
upon which, and out of which, the Papacy grew. 
Roughly speaking, the statement of Drury may 
be accepted as true: "Europe was no longer 
capable of uniting, as at the eleventh century, 
in one great religious thought, nor was she yet 
in condition to act in concert for a grand politi- 
cal idea. At the middle of the fifteenth century 
there was not a single general question which 
could rally all the governments ; there was not 
even any great force to rally the peoples about 
a principle. However this force existed and in 

75 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

France, always the vanguard of Europe, it was 
already acting. It was royalty which was to 
draw each state from feudal chaos, to secure 
internal order, to prepare equality, and through 
the encouragement given to commerce, manu- 
factures, letters and arts, to aid in the develop- 
ment of a new civilization. " 5 If we take 
" royalty " in a broad sense, to include the sov- 
ereignty of cities in Switzerland and of princi- 
palities in Germany, reinforced by the ideal of 
the Empire, the statement may stand at about 
its face value. The secular power grew in 
extent and in its appeal to the imagination; it 
became virtually coincident with the conception 
of a nation; it was helped by the furtherance 
of literatures in the languages of the peoples ; 
out of the anarchy, which the weakening of the 
Papacy left, grew the compact and fighting 
nations. It was just as this national conscious- 
ness was forming that Luther had that personal 
experience with God out of which grew the 
great Protestant revolution in religion. 

It now becomes our duty to show, if we may, 
how the freedom of the Christian man, which 
Luther experienced and for which he so greatly 
suffered and contended, became the means by 
which the Church, once the acknowledged queen 
of the state, became its humble subject. 

For this sorry plight, Luther himself cannot 
be altogether acquitted of blame. He had no 
desire that the freedom of the Christian man 

5 History of Modern Times (Grosvenor's edition), p. 7. 

76 



The Beginnings of the National Churches 

should weaken the authority of the Christian 
prince. National impulses mixed themselves 
with purely religious ones in Luther's mind, 
from the beginning. The same year which saw 
the publication of l i The Freedom of the Chris- 
tian Man" and "The Babylonish Captivity of 
the Church' ' saw also his address to the Ger- 
man Nobility summoning them to come to the 
aid of the captive Church. In that famous 
appeal occur many words of a distinctly patri- 
otic brand, like these : i ' Now that the cardinals 
have sucked Wales dry, they enter German ter- 
ritory. They begin most politely but, observe, 
German land will soon be like the Welsh. We 
already have some cardinals ; what the Eomans 
are after they think that the drunken Germans 
will not understand, until they have no bish- 
opric, monastery, manse, heller or pfennig 
left ; the mad gluttons of Germans must stand 
it. Some people believe that more than three 
hundred thousand gulden leave Germany every 
year for Eome in vain, for which we get nothing 
but scorn and mocking. We keep wondering 
why our princes, our nobles, our cities and in- 
stitutions, our land and people are so poor; 
we ought rather to wonder that we still have 
anything to eat. It is time that the German 
nation, its bishops and princes, should regard 
itself also as a Christian people and should 
guard from such devouring wolves the multi- 
tude that is committed to it to rule and defend 
in good things, bodily and spiritual. noble 

77 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

princes and gentlemen, how long will you leave 
your land and people at the mercy of these 
devouring wolves! Every prince, nobleman, 
city, should at once prohibit their subjects from 
sending the annates to Borne. 6 As though 
among all the Christians on earth, the Ger- 
mans should be the clowns of the Pope and 
suffer what no other folk will stand. We have 
the name, the title and the coat of arms of Em- 
pire, but the Pope has its treasure and power. 
The Pope has the kernel and we play with the 
shells. Let the Pope give up Rome and all that 
he has taken from the empire, give our land a 
rest from tax and oppression, give back to us 
our freedom, power, honor, bodies and souls, 
and let it be an empire indeed. Has not our 
noble nation been led by the nose long 
enough? ' ' 7 There is much of the secular mixed 
with the religious in the appeal of this great 
spiritual revolutionist. 

Through the years which followed this ap- 
peal, Luther steered a course which is rather 
difficult to follow. When some of the nobles 
took up arms to free the country, Luther, of 
whose sympathy they felt assured, strenuously 
besought them to lay them down. He insisted 
that the Word of God should be free to win 
its own victories. When, inspired in part at 
least by a new sense of spiritual worth, the 
peasants took up arms against the oppression 

6 The first year's revenue of a new clerical appointee. 

7 Printed in Rade's Luther, Vol. I, pp. 597-673. For these quotations see, 
pp. 612, 613, 614, 617, 623, 629, 667. 

78 



The Beginnings of the National Churches 

of their rulers, fully as tyrannical as the Pope, 
Luther denounced them as reckless anarchists. 
The Word must have free course. When im- 
prisoned in the Wartburg, his followers in 
Wittenberg, now in a great majority in the 
place, sought to conform public worship to the 
new teachings by force, Luther left his seclu- 
sion and at the risk of life insisted that the old 
Roman practices should be tolerated for the 
sake of brotherly love. The Word had not yet 
won its own way. For most of their respective 
lives his prince, Frederick the Wise, and he 
thoroughly agreed. The Word was to have free 
course and the prince was to give it liberty. But 
after some years had gone by, there came a time 
when Luther thought the Word had won its way 
sufficiently to be given entire control of public 
worship and of church institutions. Hence he 
demanded that, for the sake of public peace, 
Eoman masses should be suppressed by secular 
force both in the monastery and in the court 
church. He claimed that public order was en- 
dangered by allowing the few stubborn Stifts- 
herren who resisted the Word to continue in 
their practises. Frederick refused to inter- 
vene, on Luther's own ground that a Prince 
must not interfere with religion, lest he should 
be fighting spiritual battles with carnal 
weapons. This incensed Luther, who was now 
emphasizing the duty of the prince to public 
order. When Frederick died and was suc- 
ceeded by the Elector John, Luther had his 

79 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

way. John believed that it was his duty as a 
Prince to preserve public order and that it 
was his duty as a Christian Prince to see 
that the Lord was not blasphemed in the 
mass. Luther and he agreed that while the 
conscience was to be ruled only by the Lord, 
and while a man should be free to worship in 
private as he pleased, public worship, public 
religious instruction, public religious funds 
from monasteries, etc., and even the nomination 
of evangelical bishops lay in the hands of the 
prince. In holding this position, Luther was 
really falling back on a general custom of his 
Province of Saxony which was in vogue before 
his time. In the breakdown of ecclesiastical 
authority, Luther, who hated anarchy, had re- 
course to the only authority there was. The 
Christian congregation was to give its assent 
to the call of a minister and should normally 
take the initiative in all changes of church 
practise, but the Christian, that is, the Evan- 
gelical, Prince was the Protector, a kind of 
forced bishop, indeed, of the Church, and must 
see to its welfare. From his standpoint, Luther 
claimed that a Catholic prince should give the 
Word an opportunity to reform the community, 
though not being a Christian prince, he was in 
no position to put a stop to the blasphemy of 
the Catholic — or rather, devilish — mass. But 
this position was not practical; Catholic and 
Evangelical had to come to some agreement 
that would go on all fours and soon Luther 

80 



The Beginnings of the National Churches 

found himself forced to agree to the position 
that there should be but one mode of public 
worship in each principality. 8 Public order, in 
other words, had triumphed over individual 
freedom and eventually the religion of the sub- 
jects was determined by the religion of the 
prince. Here, therefore, began that aristo- 
cratic tinge in the church founded by the great 
democrat, Luther. The power of the Pope was 
destroyed, but each individual prince became 
a little Protestant Pope instead. The main 
object of Lutheran ministers became the con- 
version of Princes, in order that they might 
later convert their subjects. The fate and regu- 
lation of religion, in other words, passed from 
an official representative of its own to the 
representative of the secular power. This 
change can only be regarded by religious men 
as a necessary visitation of Providence for the 
purifying of religion, a new Babylonish exile 
from its promised land. A Church state is a 
perfectly possible ideal; a State church is the 
renunciation of the ideal. It is putting the 
Church under the heels of the State. 

Nor do we find a very different state of affairs 
in Zurich, the only other spot in Europe that 
can lay claim to being an independent center of 
Protestant faith. The chapter in the Cam- 
bridge Modern History which deals with the 
Swiss Reformation opens with this clear state- 
ment: "The Helvetic Reformation, like the 

8 Cf. Rade's Luther, Vol. Ill, Book 5. 

81 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

German, Was the outcome of both the national 
history and the Benaissance." 9 Zwingli found 
Zurich a city independent of all foreign con- 
trol in secular affairs and granted by the Pope 
no mean control of its clergy. Zwingli, as a 
matter of course, appealed to the magistracy 
of the city as to the last authority in all re- 
ligious and ecclesiastical questions. Disputa- 
tions between him and the bishop of Constance 
were heard by the city council as a court of 
last resort ; the question of the mass, of images, 
of tithes, of the partaking of meat in Lent, were 
all decided by this body. The decrees of the 
burgomaster and the magistracy decided all 
matters concerning the state, its religious prac- 
tises and military practises alike. In the 
famous confession of faith which Zwingli sent 
to Charles V, he declares: "I know the magis- 
trate, when properly inaugurated, holds God's 
place no less than the prophet." 10 With 
Luther, Zwingli distinguished between the true 
and the external church, and believed that the 
external church is guided in the Providence of 
God by the real church embosomed within it, 
but he himself asserted that for legislative pur- 
poses, the local church of any city is repre- 
sented by the board of magistrates of the city. 
One of his earliest theses, at the basis of all his 
work, ran thus : " All that the so-called spiritual 
order claims to belong to it of right and for the 

9 Cambridge History, Vol. II, p. 305. 
10 Printed in Appendix to S. M. Jackson's Huldreich Zwingli, p. 1+79. 

82 



The Beginnings of the National 'Churches 

protection of the right, belongs to the secular 
arm, when it is Christian. ' ? X1 There can be 
therefore little wonder about Zwingli's absorp- 
tion in statesmanship, about his eagerness for 
war, about his endeavors to form a large inter- 
national confederacy with Zurich as its center. 
The State was the Church and the Kingdom of 
God was to come through uniting Christian 
States. Zwingli's republicanism saves his 
church from being a creature of the prince, as 
it became under Luther, but its authority was 
lodged in the secular government and exercised 
by men who were chosen not for their com- 
petency for its affairs alone. It was strictly 
national, although perhaps we may say that it 
was more nearly the State itself than an ap- 
pendage of the State. There was little room 
for divergent types of belief and piety; Ana- 
baptists in Zurich were dealt with as enemies 
of the government; to think for oneself about 
religion tended to lead one into crime against 
the state. 

When we turn our eyes to England, we come 
on a far sorrier picture. There are few more 
disgraceful performances in history than the 
secession of the English Church from Rome. 

Exhausted by the long civil strife of the 
Wars of the Roses, the weakened barons and 
the impoverished country were more than con- 
tent to allow the rough and ready Edward IV 
to rule without the counsel of Parliament and 

11 Given in Jackson's Zivingli, p. 184. 

83 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

to establish unquestioned authority in the land. 
Henry VII, uniting in his own person the line- 
age of both Lancaster and York, continued to 
increase the power and prestige of the mon- 
archy. At the accession of Henry VIII, a well- 
filled treasury, the possession of the single train 
of artillery in the kingdom and the good will 
and confidence of the conspicuous scholars of 
the Renaissance made the King the one com- 
manding figure of the Kingdom. The creation 
of his adoring minister, Wolsey, as Papal 
Legate, accustomed even churchmen to look to 
the Court of the King instead of to Borne for 
ecclesiastical decisions. Adored at home, 
Henry wished to be mightier abroad. His wife, 
Catharine, was the aunt of the Emperor 
Charles, and Henry had expected to share in 
his conquests. Charles however treated Henry 
with disdain, and Wolsey thought a French- 
alliance would be better than the Spanish one. 
Hence he sought to induce the Pope to allow 
Henry to divorce his Spanish wife. The Pope 
temporized, but finally refused. Meanwhile 
Henry, unaccustomed to restraint, grew infatu- 
ated with a lady of his court, and pressed the 
demand for a divorce no longer to strengthen 
his kingdom but to satisfy his own heart. It 
seemed to him monstrous that a Pope at Rome 
should interfere with the will of the King. His 
lady-love grew impatient with Wolsey, the 
Papal legate, and he fell. Cromwell, one of Wol- 
sey 's friends, suggested to the King that he take 

84 



The Beginnings of the National Churches 

the reins into his own hand and cut loose from 
the only power that presumed to dictate to him. 
Thus, on the desire of a profligate and able 
King for a divorce, the Church of England as a 
separated church was founded. The entire 
church, it is true, seceded. It still maintained 
its ancient rites and customs and orders. But 
it was a different church, because it recognized 
a different supreme authority. The Pope was 
no longer its supreme head. And there can 
be no doubt that Henry caused the convocation 
of clergy to pronounce him supreme head of 
the Church, in order that he might divorce 
Catherine and wed Anne Boleyn. There were 
no doubt causes which contributed to this seces- 
sion from the Papal institution. Colet had not 
discovered and preached the simplicity of Jesus 
in vain. The impoverishment of the land by 
the monasteries and of the monasteries by the 
Pope stirred discontent with what came to be 
regarded as foreign domination of the church 
by the Pope. But the real foundation of the 
Church of England was the new conception of 
the majesty and authority of the King of the 
Nation and the chance desire of that Nation's 
king to do something prohibited by the church. 
The maxims which More mentions in the 
Utopia as prevalent in the land are symptoms 
of the satisfaction in the new national strength 
and sovereignty, to wit, to use his language, 
"the maxim that the king can do no wrong, 
however much he may wish to do it; that not 

85 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

only the property but the persons of his sub- 
jects are his own; and that a man has a right 
to no more than the King's goodness thinks fit 
not to take from him. " 12 It was this temper 
that led to the definite humiliation and plunder 
of the church which had been enriched by the 
humiliation and plunder of the barons. As 
Green says: "To reduce the great ecclesiastical 
body to a mere department of state, in which 
all authority should flow from the sovereign 
alone and in which his will should be the only 
law, his decision the only test of truth, was a 
change hardly to be wrought without a strug- 
gle, ' ' 13 but it was wrought and the Act of Su- 
premacy was duly and unanimously passed that 
' ' the King shall be taken, accepted and reputed 
the only supreme Head in earth of the Church 
of England and shall have annexed and united 
to the Imperial Crown of this realm as well the 
title and style thereof as all the honors, juris- 
dictions, authorities, immunities, profits and 
commodities to the said dignity belonging, with 
full power to visit, redress, reform and amend 
all such errors, heresies, abuses, contempts, and 
enormities, which by any manner of spiritual 
authority or jurisdiction, might or may law- 
fully be reformed. * ' 14 There can be no doubt 
that as in Germany and Switzerland, the so- 
called Protestant Church of England was a 
product in its outward form of the national 

12 Cited in Green's Short History of the English People, p. 333. 

13 Green's Short History, p. 344> 

14 Green: History of the English People. Vol. II, p. 159. 

86 



The Beginnings of the National Churches 

development of the times. And even when in 
the reign of Edward VI and of Elizabeth the 
real spirit of Protestantism began to make it- 
self felt in England, there was no suggestion 
of any save a State Church, regulated by Par- 
liament and demanding uniformity throughout 
the nation. Had we time to examine the church 
in Geneva from which these later religious in- 
fluences reached England and Scotland, we 
should find the case no different. Toleration 
was a sign of looseness of faith and courage. 
The State decided the belief and the religious 
practises of its subjects. If a man rendered 
unto Caesar the things that were Caesar's, then 
he could render to God what was God's, but 
only then. God still, to all intents and purposes, 
had a vicar on earth. It was not the Pope ; he 
was Anti-Christ; but it was Caesar. It is true 
there were many Caesars and their rule was 
limited by definite geographical lines, but 
within those lines, they were supreme in estab- 
lishing and maintaining the outward tests and 
ordinances of religion. Everywhere in Protes- 
tantism, religion became the subservient and 
generally the obsequious servant of the State. 
Lord Acton has thus expressed the desperate 
situation : i l Nations ; eagerly invested their 
rulers with every prerogative needed to pre- 
serve their faith and all the care to keep church 
and state asunder and to prevent the confusion 
of their powers, which had been the work of 
ages, were renounced in the intensity of the 

87 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

crisis. . . . When the last of the Eeformers 
died, religion, instead of emancipating the na- 
tions, had become an excuse for the criminal 
acts of despots." 15 

And I hardly think it an exaggeration to say 
that everywhere on Protestant territory the 
church became an arm of the state. It was 
forced into a subservient and often into an 
obsequious attitude. It hardened and even 
sanctified national divisions; it vastly aided 
racial prejudice ; it helped to produce centuries 
of war. The present catastrophe in Europe is an 
outcome of governmental greed and suspicion, 
but most of the men in control of the policies 
of the governments now at war are devout and 
conscientious members of national churches 
and the deep distrust at the foundation of this 
carnage is not purely the distrust of one gov- 
ernment for another but of one nation for an- 
other. And it seems to me quite impossible to 
acquit organized Christianity of aiding and 
abetting the greatest crime of the century. 
Unless we deny Christianity any influence over 
men's minds at all, we must reluctantly hold 
it, as organized under the suzerainty of the 
States, a guilty accomplice of wholesale mur- 
der. For in England and Germany the 
churches have been under the unquestioned 
guidance, control and support of the secular 
power. In Eussia the Holy Orthodox Church, 
although, originally, not devoid of pretensions 

15 History of Freedom and other Essays, pp. 43~44- 

88 



The Beginnings of the National Churches 

to Catholicity, is to all intents and purposes a 
national church. Since 1700 there has been no 
Muscovite patriarch and the Czar has presided 
over the Holy Synod. The new Constitution of 
the Eussian Church builds upon the absolute 
supremacy of the Czar, and the Holy Synod is 
simply a department of the national govern- 
ment. In these countries all the holy impulses 
of religion have magnified the nation and have 
often substituted patriotism for the brother- 
hood of man. It is true that Catholicism has 
done but little better in assuaging race hatred 
and that Austria, Italy and France are en- 
tangled in this fratricidal conflict. But it is 
only fair to point out that it is a divided and 
disrupted Catholic Church to which they have 
belonged. Protestantism split the ecclesiastical 
unity of mankind and substituted for it a 
system of organized public worship which has 
glorified those national divisions and concep- 
tions which are among the greatest enemies of 
the essential spirit of Christianity. If there 
were anything needed to condemn the principle 
of a national church and of religious establish- 
ment under the control of a delimited state, 
this European War has supplied the need. The 
world cries out to-day either for a world-wide, 
a genuinely catholic organization of Christian- 
ity, on the one hand, or for a Church in which 
the catholic spirit of Jesus reigns and in which 
all national lines are ignored and obliterated 
on the other. 

89 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

The Papacy must indeed have been corrupt 
to have fallen before so secular a conception of 
the Church as that which resulted in these na- 
tional organizations. Had there not been hid- 
den at the heart of the nations the principle of 
religious freedom, the Eeformation of Luther 
might well have been termed the most sinister 
event in the history of Christianity. 

Fortunately, there were men who held re- 
ligion too high to allow it to be controlled by 
secular powers. And the remaining lectures in 
this course are devoted to a portrayal of their 
tragic personal fate and of their high and 
enduring accomplishments. 



DO 



LECTURE IV 

THE BEGINNINGS OP THE FREE 
CHURCHES 



LECTUEE IV 

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE FREE 
CHURCHES 

Th© free church is no Protestant creation; 
the first church was free. The Jewish followers 
of the Nazarene, driven from the synagogue of 
the ancients, were not bound by the chains of 
the State. Free were they to worship and to 
fellowship as was revealed to them from their 
risen Lord. As they grew stronger, they be- 
gan to be ferreted out by the imperial authori- 
ties for persecution. They had no thought of 
obeying the dictates of the State, no dream that 
it would ever carry out theirs. The State and 
they were scarcely enemies, but they were not 
friends. Yet in the course of time the State 
and Church captured each other — and weakened 
each other. Under Theodosius, at the close of 
the fourth century, the Empire and the Church 
began to coalesce and the fatal process cul- 
minated in the year 425, when Valentinian III 
decreed that all citizens of the Roman Empire 
should become Christians. The Pope did not 
decree that all Christians should be citizens of 
Rome; the Emperor decreed that all citizens 
should be followers of Christ. As outward 
force was the cause of unity, the world moulded 

93 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

the church more than the church moulded the 
world. But since that fatal coalition, consider- 
able groups of earnest Christians have not only 
expressed, but organized, their dissatisfaction 
at the conformity of the church to the world. 
Even before the Church made its surrender to 
the Empire, the Montanists broke away from 
its growing inflexibility and respectability in 
the interests of freedom for the Spirit and sub- 
jugation for the flesh. Just as their influence 
waned the Novatians arose on the issue of the 
laxity of the church, gathered into their fellow- 
ship the struggling remnants of the Montanists, 
and were dubbed the Catharoi (the pure) by 
their cynical opponents. Scarcely had these 
old Puritans grown weak under persecution 
and ostracism, when the widespread Donatist 
movement set in. This fellowship endured for 
well over a hundred years, until the very time 
in which Valentinian published his edict. It 
was marked by a more well-defined opposition 
to a worldly church than any of the earlier 
sects. It insisted on re-ordination and re-bap- 
tism of all who had been defiled by ecclesiastical 
association with those church officials w T ho had 
proven faithless under the last great persecu- 
tion to which the church was exposed. There 
was scarcely ever a time when the Roman 
Church was the sole representative of religion 
even in its own territory. Save perhaps in the 
7th and 8th centuries, there were always earnest 
souls who felt that religion was not identical 

04 



The Beginnings of the Free Churches 

with the church, and who desired a purer fel- 
lowship. It is hard, perhaps, to acquit them 
of a touch of Pharisaism but their souls were 
cramped by formalism and officialism. When 
the hardening influences of a stereotyped eccle- 
siasticism were reinforced by the authority of 
the State, the religious life of the Church be- 
came still further ossified; there was more rea- 
son for rebellion but a far graver risk in it. 
When the Church controlled the machinery of 
the State and when the State was insisting 
upon unity throughout its heterogeneous do- 
minions, it seemed necessary to submit. To 
rebel meant to rob the inevitably victorious 
church of the few who were in earnest about 
their religion. In the words of an anonymous 
Romance tract of the 12th century : ' i The elect 
of God were captives in Babylon and served 
as gold with which Antichrist covered his van- 
ity. ' ' 1 But though for a while new sects were 
not formed, the decreasing Donatists and the 
Priscillians, a Pietistic sect, continued until 
well into the latter half of the sixth century. 
The spirit represented by them, however, did 
not altogether die out, for in the beginning of 
the ninth century, the Paulicians, denouncing 
Sacramentalism and the worship of saints and 
relics, arose and flourished until in the 11th 
century they seem to have poured their 
strength into a Slavic movement of consider- 

1 Quoted in Neander's History of the Christian Religion and Church 
(Torrey's translation), Vol. IV, p. 615. 

95 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

able significance, known as the Friends of God. 
Along the trade-lines from the East to the 
West, this movement spread in force and grew 
in power, until under the name of Catharists 
it virtually possessed Southern France and 
reached into Germany on the North and into 
Spain on the South. Thoroughly dualistic in 
its theology, it emphasized the necessity of the 
most stringent ascetism at least for its Apos- 
tles, who by a peculiar Sacrament received the 
power to forgive the sins of their followers. 
They denounced the worship and Sacraments 
of the church, the reading of the Old Testa- 
ment, the worship of saints and the cross, and 
declared in unmistakable tones that all Catholic 
priests had committed the unpardonable sin. 
By the severity and abnegation of their lives 
and the power of their preachers, they gained 
the hearts of the people and maintained them- 
selves well into the thirteenth century. Either 
among them or at one side of them, Peter of 
Bruis and Henry of Lausanne overwhelmed 
the priests with their mighty eloquence, and 
for the first time in history denounced not only 
the mass but the baptism of infants, insisting 
upon faith as necessary to church membership, 
and to the high title of Christian. 2 Before they 
had spent their force, the sudden death of a 
friend drove Peter Waldo to a study of the 
scriptures and to so strong a desire to proclaim 

2 For a brief account of these Sects see Neander (Torrey) : History of 
the Christian Religion, Vol. IV, pp. 559-60 U. 

96 



The Beginnings of the Free Churches 

their good tidings that the inhibition and even 
excommunication of the Pope had no weight 
either with him or his followers. By no means 
unhappy in the Roman church, and maintaining 
a close doctrinal resemblance to it, wonderfully 
free from vagaries of every sort, appealing but 
little to the imagination, with the instincts of 
Bible-readers yet condemned to be heretics, it 
seems indeed a freak of fate that of all these 
schismatics that have been mentioned, they 
alone have withstood all the violent persecu- 
tions directed against them and have remained 
unto this day. But, as we shall see, "come- 
outers" fail where "driven-outers" succeed. 
Perhaps the sanity of their communion pro- 
tected them from extermination on the one 
hand and from any determining influence on 
the other. But this in all fairness we must say : 
without intending to, and without appearing to 
have the spiritual riches to justify it, it is to 
them that the world owes the first enduring free 
church of history. Of all communions on earth 
to-day they have lived longest without being 
tied to any secular power and without ever 
having sacrificed their apparently unneeded 
independence. It is difficult to correctly es- 
timate the extent and quality of their influence. 
It was exerted in various ways, some of which 
we can trace, but it is probable that it is the 
most important that we cannot trace. Through 
Nicholas of Basle, Waldensian thought power- 
fully influenced the mvstic Tauler and through 

97 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

his writings not only quickened the hearts of 
many of the noblest Catholics but reached and 
moulded Luther himself. How far it was re- 
sponsible for the great Protestant Free-Church 
movement, to which we are to turn in a moment, 
is more doubtful, but so similar were the two 
movements in their beliefs that these words of 
David of Augsburg concerning the Walden- 
sians, written only about fifty years after 
Waldo's death in 1218, seem as if they must 
have been written to describe the Anabaptists 
three hundred years later. "Having been cast 
out from the Catholic Church they affirm that 
they alone are the Church of Christ and dis- 
ciples of Christ. They say that they are the 
successors of the apostles and have apostolic 
authority and the keys of binding and loosing. 
They say that the Romish Church is the Baby- 
lonish harlot and that all who obey her are 
damned. They say that for the first time is a 
man truly baptized who is inducted into their 
heresy. But some say that baptism does not 
avail for little children, because they cannot 
yet actually believe. They repudiate all cleri- 
cal orders, saying they would be rather a curse 
than a sacrament. Every oath is unlawful. 
They say it is not lawful to put malefactors to 
death through secular judgment." 3 The 
primacy of the Waldensians among free 
churches caused many later similar movements 
to be called by their name or at least to be 

3 See Newman: History of Anti-Pedobaptism, p. 46. 

98 



The Beginnings of the Free Churches 

regarded as their spiritual children. So it was 
with the Bohemian brethren, for example, ac- 
cording to the testimony of Prof. Newman. 
I have unfortunately been unable to get at the 
original authorities of this important move- 
ment. Its originator, the saintly Peter Chel- 
cicky, declares that the apostasy of the Church 
began when the relation of Church and State 
changed. He affirms that an insoluble contra- 
diction is involved in the expression, "the 
Christian State, " since to the essence of the 
state belongs compulsion, which is abhorrent to 
the true Christian. 4 Yet curiously enough, if 
Archivar Keller is correct, the Bohemian 
brethren never separated themselves from the 
state church. 5 We know however that Nicholas 
Storch, an important figure in the first stage of 
the Anabaptist movement which we are about 
to consider, was influenced by them both in 
thought and in church organization, and it 
seems not unlikely that he knew them as Wal- 
densians. 6 It may therefore well be that the 
Waldensian movement was the channel through 
which the new life in Bohemia poured itself into 
the still newer life of Germany. And, once 
again, in that later offspring of the Anabaptist 
movement which we call the Mennonite con- 
nection, which flourished in those parts of the 
Netherlands in which considerable remnants of 
the Waldensians were settled, we find the Men- 

4 Newman: History of Anti-Pedobaptism, pp. 1^50, 1^51. 
b Keller: Die Wiedertaufer, p. 16. 
6 Newman, op. cit., p. 68. 

99 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

nonite leader, Cornelius van Huyzen, recogniz- 
ing the Waldensians as the originators of their 
creed and worship. Indeed later we find some 
English sectaries asserting that through 
Mennonite and Waldensian they had main- 
tained an unbroken succession from the apos- 
tles. But here again the Waldensian movement 
is only an adopted father of children of quite a 
different parentage. It is the sturdiest of a 
long succession of free-church movements be- 
fore the Beformation, but no more than they, 
and far less than some of them, did it occupy 
the center of the religious drama of the times. 
It was only when Luther and Zwingli had made 
possible to men a free connection with God that 
the spiritual atmosphere was produced in which 
a free church movement could become a perma- 
nent and vital force in the world. 

The great free church movement of Protes- 
tant, of essentially non-conforming, Christians 
was borne into the world by Anabaptists and 
made vital by Congregationalists — "for the 
base things of the world and the things that are 
despised did God choose, yea, and the things 
that are not to bring' ' not "to nought" in this 
case but to completion, "the things that are." 

I wish that some great scholar might give his 
strength to the sympathetic examination and 
presentation of the Anabaptist storm of the 
early sixteenth century, or rather of that storm 
of which strict Anabaptism was the blackest 
cloud. It is impossible to describe it; it is al- 

100 



The Beginnings of the Free Churches 

most impossible even to hold it together. Bul- 
linger, its fairest contemporary chronicler, dis- 
tinguishes twelve different "sects" among 
them, and there were doubtless more, though 
they were different from what he thought them. 
They differed from each other on a thousand 
minor points which the sympathetic Capito 
justly said "stand outside of any connection 
with the honor of God" 7 and they were ready 
to endure persecution and death for each dif- 
ference. They differed from each other, also, on 
some most vital points, — on the authority of the 
Old Testament and even on that of the New, 
on the use and form of the sacraments and on 
the constitution of the church, on the existence 
of civil government, on the sufferance of oaths 
and private property, on the duration of the 
world, and on the use of force. Nearly all 
primitive Anabaptists disbelieved in physical 
resistance to evil ; long before the Quakers were 
thought of hundreds of these convinced paci- 
fists laid their lives down joyfully; yet the 
movement also included those who mistook Jan 
of Leyden for the Messiah and set up a polyg- 
amous kingdom of God at Minister which they 
defended with swords and strategy for well on 
toward two years against some of the best sol- 
diery of the time. All kinds of people belonged 
to this wide-spread movement — the Zwickau- 
prophets who terrorized and sterilized Luther 
and the Huttites fleeing from well-ordered 

7 Newman, op. tit., p. 2J+5. 

101 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

homes because they would not allow their prince 
to strike a blow in their defense, Hans Denck 
and Schwengfeld, contemptuous of all outward 
rites and organization and those who insisted 
that only the immersed w r ere open to salvation, 
the scholarly Grebel and Hubmaier and the Lit- 
tle Greek marched side by side with Blaurock 
the peasant and Andy of the Crutches — but 
upon this one point they all agreed, that over 
the consciences to which God had spoken no 
man nor state nor church had any power. The 
Spirit had come to them and they were not to 
be longer in subjection to the beggarly elements 
of this world. It was for freedom that Christ 
had set them free and they would far rather 
part from the body than from this free Spirit. 
They were often wild and they were usually un- 
stable, but they were a noble army of martyrs. 
There is little exaggeration in this bitter de- 
scription of them by Zwingli : l ' They judge the 
faults of others but see none of their own. To- 
day they wish this; to-morrow its opposite; 
to-day no government, a little later a govern- 
ment indeed, but one in which no governor shall 
be considered a Christian ; to-day they demand 
a church of their own, afterwards they de- 
nounce the state for protecting the preaching 
of the gospel ; at one time the priests should be 
slain, at another they should be allowed free 
rein; when children are baptized they bellow 
that there is no sin greater. They perform more 
such monkey-tricks every day than the African 

102 



The Beginnings of the Free Churches 

wild-beasts. They greet no one of whom they 
disapprove. They quarrel at all corners of the 
city; if that is forbidden them, they go into 
their private quarrel-houses and sit in judg- 
ment on all men. When they have finished 
with that, they rinse each other out with such 
bitterness that there is enough gall left to bathe 
in. Such a poor, confused, bitter temper they 
call Spirit, whereas it is a most melancholy 
flesh./' In other words they were free men of 
the spirit like their progenitors in Corinth, 
prophets who had not learned to control their 
prophetic spirits. 8 But they counted not their 
lives dear unto themselves and some of the 
most moving scenes in Christian history are 
their martydoms at the hands of their brethren 
in the state churches, for whom they prayed 
in all tenderness as the fire kindled about them. 
It is only recently that justice has been shown 
them at the hands of historians. Their name, 
Anabaptists, second Baptizers, has been not 
only scornful but misleading. For most of us 
to-day they are a rout of fanatical sacramen- 
tarians. It is true that they bitterly denounced 
infant baptism and that nearly all of them 
recognized the validity of the baptism of be- 
lievers only, but the great movement had some- 
thing far more fundamental at stake than the 
form of a Christian rite. Its deepest interest 
and its originating motive lay outside the sacra- 
mental realm. Egli, the great modern author- 

8 1 Cor. 14 : 32. 

103 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

ity on the Swiss Beformation, 9 who was a "care- 
ful investigator of Anabaptist origins, has 
brought enough original material to light to dis- 
tinguish three distinct periods in their brief and 
startling history. The first, beginning in the 
summer of 1523, had to do with a separate 
church, the second, beginning in the summer 
of 1524, had to do with infant baptism, only the 
third, beginning in January of 1525, had to do 
with the public baptism of those who were com- 
pelled to disown the baptism administered to 
them in their infancy. 10 Separation from the 
state church was their primary object; ques- 
tions regarding baptism were quite secondary 
to that. The witnesses against Felix Manz, 
who was drowned by order of the court, garbled 
a real truth when they affirmed that he told 
them that "there was more behind baptism 
than was yet declared" and "that baptism 
would at last overthrow the government. ' ' X1 
Long ago Dorner correctly estimated the rela- 
tive importance of these three leading convic- 
tions of theirs, when he wrote: "Zwingli saw 
that the setting aside of infant baptism was the 
same as setting aside the National Church, ex- 
changing a hitherto national reformation of the 
church for one more or less Donatist. And if 
infant baptism were given up, there remained 
as the proper time for its administering only 

9 The greatest work on this entire movement is his unfinished Geschichte 
der Schweizerischen Reformation. 
™Egli, op. cit., p. 325. 
11 Burr age: Anabaptists in Switzerland, p. 102. 

104 



The Beginnings of the Free Churches 

the moment when living faith and regeneration 
were certain. ' ' 12 Sebastian Franck, a con- 
temporary chronicler, saw into their hearts 
when he wrote of them : ' ' Certain ones among 
them wish a Christian to be so holy, simple, 
innocent, dead to the world, so perfect, that he 
should never live after the flesh nor seek that 
which is upon the earth. Therefore a Chris- 
tian does not desire to live in accordance with 
the world, nor to value anything worldly. 
Dying and living are the same to him; indeed 
this life has become a monotony." 13 And 
though Nippold goes too far when he says that 
the Anabaptists were the first to defend the 
separation of Church and State, 14 there can be 
no doubt that the erection of a spiritual church 
after the copy of the Apostolic church, freed 
from the strangling alliance with the State, was 
their initial as well as their highest hope. With 
a cause so essential to religion we can well un- 
derstand why Zwingli declared the destruction 
of the Papal church to be "child's play" in 
comparison with the annihilation of these sec- 
taries. 15 

In the joy of seeing one tyranny overthrown, 
these clear-thinking and high-spirited men were 
horrified to see another being set up. A Papal 
despotism was bad enough but it was at least 

12 Geschichte der Protestantischen Theologie, pp. 293-294, quoted in Burrage, 
op. cit., p. 76. 

13 Keller: Wiedertaufer, p. 14- 

u Berner Beitrdge, quoted in Nitsche: Geschichte der Wiedert'&ufer in der 
Schweiz. 

™Egli, op. cit., p. 332. 

105 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

a spiritual despotism, whereas the new regime 
in their city of Zurich was a secular one. The 
Spirit of Christ, Dweller within the individual 
soul, was being enthralled by the state. Men 
chosen for their business acumen and their 
military capacity were to become the authori- 
tative judges of a divine force which brooked 
no judgment and to which most of them were 
strangers. They were much truer than Luther 
to those words of his: "From the beginning 
the worldly and the spiritual offices have been 
sundered by Christ. And experience shows but 
too clearly that there can be no peace where 
the city controls the preacher or where the 
preacher controls the city. ' ' 16 They feared 
that true religion would fare worse under mer- 
chants than under bishops. They could see 
but little gain in substituting Zurich for Rome. 
"These Baptists," said old Bullinger, "com- 
plain that the evangelical preachers use the 
government in matters of religion and that they 
declare not only that it may, but that it should, 
busy itself concerning matters of faith. But 
they (the Baptists) hold the precise opposite 
most stubbornly, — in which, indeed, they 
agree in part with the Papists who would shut 
out the Kaiser, the King, the Princes and all 
lords from the affairs of faith and church.' ' 
Here the amazed Protestant historian reveals 
to us the spiritual brotherhood of Papists 
and Free Christians, standing shoulder to 

16 Hast: Geschichte der Wiedertaufer, p. 147. 

106 



The Beginnings of the Free Churches 

shoulder for the independence of religion 
against the Protestant secularists. It is be- 
cause of this horror at the secularization of 
religion that in the old Anabaptist record, we 
find these proud words: "Anno 1524 and 1525 
is God's Word and the Gospel of Jesus Christ 
come into all Germany after the Peasants' 
War." We are fortunately in possession of 
some of the earliest conversations which her- 
alded that coming. The three men who may 
be regarded as its discoverers are Stumpf, a 
preacher, Grebel, a young humanist, and Felix 
Manz, a citizen of learning and position. 
These three, Bullinger tells us, thought first to 
win Zwingli to their views. — "Over and over 
they visited him and Jud (his colleague) and 
reminded them that both of them should found 
a separate people and church, in which Chris- 
tians should live guiltlessly according to the 
Gospel and should not be corrupted by interest 
or other usury. They should kill all the priests, 
Stumpf said; he had told his people that they 
should not pay interest nor tithes. Stumpf 
and Grebel insisted on having all things in 
common. When Manz said once that no one 
should be allowed in the new church that was 
not without sin, Zwingli asked if he would like 
to be one of them. At a meeting at Jud's house, 
the enthusiasts told Zwingli that he went too 
slow and was lukewarm in the concerns of the 
Church and God's Kingdom,. The Spirit 
spurred to greater seriousness. . . . The apos- 

107 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

ties in Jerusalem separated themselves from 
the wicked that they might establish a company 
of the faithful. So in Zurich it was necessary to 
separate from the crowd and to gather a pure 
church and a company of outspoken children 
of God, who have His spirit and are ruled 
thereby. Zwingli replied that the apostles had 
separated only from the enemies of the Gospel, 
not from those that were on the way to become 
its friends. "Dear brethren," he said, "don't 
think too much of yourselves. Be patient with 
the weak, sick flock that belong with you in 
Christ's fold, and separate rather from the 
works of darkness. You will not induce me to 
favor such a separation as you desire, for I 
cannot enter into it with God. ' ' 17 Shortly after 
these famous conversations, a great disputa- 
tion was held in the city of Zurich regarding 
the mass and the destruction of images. When 
Grebel, at the close of its second day, proposed 
that the priests should be correctly instructed 
in regard to the mass, Zwingli replied that the 
members of the Council would decide that mat- 
ter. At once Stumpf cried out: "You have no 
right to leave the decision with them. The 
decision is already given. The Spirit of God 
decides. Should the gentlemen of the Council 
give a decision contrary to the Word of God, 
then imploring Christ for His Spirit, I will 
teach and act against them. ' ' 18 All this time 

17 Nitsche, op. cit., p. 9. Egli, op. cit., pp. 89-90. 

18 Burrage, Anabaptists in Switzerland, p. 69. Egli, op. cit., p. 106. 

103 



The Beginnings of the Free Churches 

nothing seems to have been said regarding the 
baptismal rite, because of which they have so 
unjustly been dubbed Anabaptists. And even 
after they had denounced Infant Baptism in a 
public disputation as a creation of the Pope 
and had begun to baptize their adherents, the 
Council of Zurich issued the following procla- 
mation: "Moreover (in the same discussion) it 
clearly appeared that the authors of Anabap- 
tism, by whom these gatherings and sects were 
first raised and for which they strive, were 
actuated in this affair by a bold and shameless 
mind and not by a good spirit, intending to 
gather around them a separate people and sect, 
contrary to God's commands, in contempt of 
the civil magistrate, to the planting of every 
kind of disobedience, and to the destruction of 
Christian love to neighbors. For they regard 
themselves as without sin and better than their 
fellow-Christians, as their words, actions, and 
life clearly testify." 19 The Council did not 
allow a dispute about baptism to cover up their 
initial — to them blasphemous — purpose of es- 
tablishing a separated church. And two years 
later still (1527), understanding the root 
of all this turmoil and refusing to stress 
the baptismal controversies, the Council 
invited the other members of the Swiss Con- 
federacy to take common measures against the 
Anabaptists who were aiming at the destruc- 
tion "not only of the true right faith of Chris- 

19 Burr age, op. cit., p. lift. 

109 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

tian hearts but also of outward and human 
ordinances and institutions of Christian and 
ordinary government, against brotherly love 
and good morals." 20 The leaders of the move- 
ment, then, regarded the State Church and in- 
cidentally the State itself, as then constituted, 
as their prime foe. This fact alone accounts 
for the fierceness and the persecution directed 
against these free-churchmen by Catholics and 
Evangelicals, by princes and Reichstag, by 
cities and magistrates. They had no concep- 
tion of the rights that men claim when they be- 
lieve themselves to be liberated from human 
tyrannies by the Spirit of God; it was simply 
their clear duty to put down the beginnings of 
anarchy. And though, after the movement 
spread from Zurich where it originated in its 
noblest form, it became largely a Baptist prop- 
aganda, we are reminded every once in a while 
of its deeper meaning by the statements of — or 
about — its individual converts. Thus Capito 
bears witness to Michael Sattler martyred at 
Rothenburg in 1527, saying that "he showed 
great zeal for the honor of God and the Church 
of Christ, which he wished to have pure and 
irreproachable and free from offense to those 
without." 21 Even as late as 1551, Ghirlandi, 
an Italian priest, left the Roman Church and 
finally joined the Mennonite branch of this 
movement, because he "sought a people who 
should be free from bondage of sin through 

20 Newman, op. cit., p. 14-7. 
si Z,c, p. 244- 

110 



The Beginnings of the Free Churches 

the gospel of truth, and should walk in newness 
of life, a people that is God's holy, unspotted 
church, separate from sinners, without wrinkle 
and without blemish. " 22 And Menno Simon, 
perhaps the noblest and most efficient of all 
the Anabaptists, converted to them in spite of 
the outrageous extravagances of Muenster, 
which he loathed, whose work influenced Eng- 
lish and future American dissenters, and whose 
churches abide to this day, is proof that the 
movement even in its later stages was never 
without the high enthusiasm of its initial pro- 
test against bondage to the world. "We must 
be born from above,' ' he says, "and transposed 
out of the evil nature of Adam into the good 
way of Christ from which a new life follows. 
The poor ignorant people are vainly consoled 
through external works and exercises. Let 
each one ... no longer trust in the fact that he 
is a baptized Christian, nor upon long usage, 
nor upon papal decrees, nor upon imperial 
edicts nor upon the wit of the learned, nor upon 
human counsels and wisdom. No Scripture 
says that a carnally-minded man without new 
birth from God's Spirit has been saved nor can 
be, merely because he boasts his faith in Christ 
or hears mass or goes to Church or makes pil- 
grimages. For us a counsel has been made in 
heaven, to which alone we listen and which 
alone we must follow. ' ' 23 



22 Newman, p. 331. 
™ I.e., p. 300. 



Ill 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

Freedom has always been regarded as a dan- 
gerous word by those in authority; it is not 
therefore to be wondered at that these obscure 
men who contended so unequivocally for it as 
a right, and not merely as a convenience, at the 
gray dawn of the modern era, should have been 
persecuted by States and princes and should 
themselves have been bitter against the State. 
Sebastian Franck estimated that more than 
two thousand Anabaptists were executed in 
the five years between 1525 and 1530. 24 It is 
somewhat strange that in the face of these 
figures, the Christian world should throw its 
hands quite so high in air over the blasphemous 
Kingdom of God in Muenster. As a matter of 
fact it should rather seem strange that the 
main movement of the Anabaptists should have 
been so slightly influenced by the Peasants' 
War at its beginning and should have been 
blotted by only one Muenster at its height. 

If our estimate of the dominant force behind 
this movement be in the direction of the truth, 
it is not strange that we should find so many 
extreme opinions with regard to government 
attributed to its leaders. As a matter of fact, 
they disagreed about its function and its rights. 
They may be said to be unanimous in their 
belief that, as Eothman put it in the earlier 
days of the development at Muenster, ' ' In mat- 
ters of faith the assembled church and not the 
magistracy has the authority. ' ' 25 The Mora- 

24 Newman, p. 151. 

25 I.e., p. 281. 

112 



The Beginnings of the Free Churches 

vians admitted that God had given the princes 
authority over unbelievers. 26 Hubmaier in- 
sisted that the civil power has the right to ex- 
ecute evil doers but that God alone should 
punish the godless. 27 They would have all sub- 
scribed to the preface in which Castellio dedi- 
cated his Latin Bible to Edward VI: "The 
only enemies of our faith are vices and vices 
can be conquered only by virtues. The Christ, 
who said if they strike you on the one cheek, 
turn the other also, has called us to the spiritual 
task of instructing men in the truth, and that 
work can never be put into the hands of an 
executioner. ' ' 28 

There were some among them who went 
further than this. Manz, accused for having 
denounced magistracy, asserted that he held 
rather that no Christian might exercise it, 
though no one should punish with the sword. 29 
Melanchthon names certain Anabaptists in 
Jena who held that no Christian could be a 
magistrate, because no Christian should punish 
with the sword. 30 This view was widely held, 
so widely that when Henry VIII, in far off Eng- 
land, proclaimed religious toleration in 1540, 
he expressly excepted those who held that it 
was unlawful for Christians to bear office. 31 
There was a strong, though not quite unan- 

26 Hast: Die Wiedertdufer , pp. 206-7. 

27 Newman, op. cit., p. 97. 

28 Jones: Spiritual Reformers in 16th and 17th centuries, p. 93. 

29 Cf. Burrage, op. cit., pp. 102, 106. 

30 See Hast, op. cit., p. 237. 

31 Newman, op. cit., p. 350. 

113 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

imous, feeling among the free-churchmen 
against warfare of any kind, some refusing to 
pay taxes for war, some refusing to engage in 
war, though not unwilling to supply soldiers 
with food (Jacob Gross of Strassburg), the 
great majority insisting upon unqualified non- 
resistance. Melchior Hoffman was indeed the 
first prominent free-churchman (for Muenzer 
was not a free-churchman) to abandon the 
idea. 32 The Moravians, like Muenzer, insisted 
on community of goods, which raised the wrath 
of the nobles, who had been already roundly 
denounced by such Anabaptist leaders as 
Grebel, Kantius and Eoubli. 33 Very many, too, 
refused to take oaths. But biblical reasons 
were operative at many of these points as well 
as democratic ones. And it may well be 
doubted whether any other leaders than Hut 
and Tiziano opposed magistracy as an institu- 
tion and wished to live without a State. John 
Bruppacher of Zumikon, though on the rack, 
declared that he had never heard that the Ana- 
baptists teach that there should be no govern- 
ment or that they sought to overthrow it. 34 The 
Roman Catholic priest, Faber, claimed, it is 
true, in a little brochure published soon after 
the martyrdom of the scholarly Anabaptist, 
Hubmaier, that he had confessed to him that 
" their reason and object was to have no gov- 
ernment but only from their own number to 



| 32 C/: Newman," op. cit.,~PP- 184, 185, 207, 235, 242, etc. 
33 I.e., p. 235. 
84 Burrage, op. cit., p. 211. 

114 



The Beginnings of the Free Churches 

draw out and elect one." 35 But in Hubmaier 's 
treatise "On the Sword/' we read rather "To 
punish the wicked is not to hate the enemy; 
the magistrate does not kill from wrath but 
according to the commandment of God. ' ' 36 

Curiously enough this fierce battle for re- 
ligious freedom, the first costly skirmish for a 
free church in a free state which may be said 
to belong to the main campaign in which we 
are still engaged, was fought for an outpost 
apparently a good way from the base. For 
though it was the relation of Church and State 
that was at stake, the issue was joined concern- 
ing the sacrament of baptism. And yet any one 
who has transported himself sympathetically 
to the times of the Eeformation has no difficulty 
in explaining that fact. The controversy con- 
cerning the Lord's Supper was really the bat- 
tle-field over which was waged the battle be- 
tween the Papists on the one hand and the 
Protestants on the other. Behind that conflict 
indeed was the far deeper one regarding the 
basis upon which sinful men might find accep- 
tance with God, but the sacramental conception 
of the Eoman Church was the visible token of 
its conquest over the hearts of the people. And 
history has shown that Zwingli and Calvin es- 
timated its importance and its inevitable effects 
far more truly even than Luther. So the men 
who fought for religious freedom, who groaned 

85 Vedder: Hubmaier, pp. 240-241. 

8 « Printed in Vedder 1 s Hubmaier. See particularly pp. 287, 296, 801. 

115 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

under the subjection of the church and the 
Christian to a company of aldermen, saw that 
it was again a sacrament that stood like ada- 
mant in their path. What the mass was to the 
reformers because of what it implied concern- 
ing the basis of justification, infant baptism 
was to the free-churchmen because of what it 
implied with regard to membership in the 
church. In those ritualistic times, what the eye 
saw carried greater weight than what the ear 
heard, and no matter what was decided about 
the efficacy of the mass and about the impor- 
tance of personal faith, if every one was bap- 
tized in infancy and if every one who was so 
baptized was regarded as a member of the 
church, it was evidently hopeless to differenti- 
ate a Christian and a citizen. The weightier 
matters of religion would be buried under 
tithes and taxes, and the Church would become 
a branch of the police of the city councils. 
Therefore it was that in Zwingli's phrase, the 
people were "so hot about infant baptism," 37 
therefore that disputation after disputation 
was called to consider it in the various towns of 
Switzerland and South Germany and therefore 
that every town council agreed with the spirit 
of the proclamation of the council of Zurich: 
' ' All children must be baptized as soon as they 
are born and all parents ignoring this shall be 
imprisoned." The agitation about baptism of 
infants ended in transferring the rite from a 

37 Cf. Nitsche: Geschichte der Wiederatufer, p. 28. 

116 



The Beginnings of the Free Churches 

law of the Church into a law of the State. 38 The 
State and Church became thereby indistin- 
guishable. 

But fortunately the bold champions of spiri- 
tual freedom took a further step, more daring, 
more radical than any they had been called to 
take hitherto. Surcharged with a conscious- 
ness of its high import, the old Anabaptist 
document, from which I have already quoted, 
thus recounts it: "The Reformers have smit- 
ten the vessel out of the hand of the Pope, but 
left the fragments therein; for a new birth of 
life hath one never seen with them. ... To this 
wonderful work God hath called men in Swit- 
zerland; amongst them have been Balthazar 
Hubmeyer, Konrad Grebel, Felix Manz and 
Georg von Chur. These men had recognized 
that one must first learn the divine message, 
the love of an active faith, and only after hav- 
ing done so, should he receive Christian bap- 
tism. But since, at that time, there was no 
servant ordained to such work, Georg of the 
house of Jacob, called Blaurock, rose up and 
prayed Konrad Grebel in the name of God that 
he should baptize him. After that was done, the 
others there present did demand the same from 
Georg, and began to hold and to teach the faith. 
Therewith hath the separation from the world 
originated and hath grown up. ' ' 

In this epoch-making transaction two things 
are to be noted. The first is that no words are 

3S Burrage, op. cit., p. 99. 

117 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

wasted regarding the form of baptism. Some 
months after this, a man named Wolfgang Uli- 
mann was immersed in the Ehine near Schaff- 
hausen at his own request, but his example was 
only partially followed. It was not immersion, 
it was baptism, about which these high words 
were written. And the second thing to be noted 
is that baptism was regarded as initiation into 
the church. It was not an initiation into fel- 
lowship with God. As Hubmaier said at the 
beginning: " Where water-baptism according 
to the ordinance of Christ has not again been 
instituted, there one knows not who is brother 
and sister, there is no church, no fraternal dis- 
cipline or correction, no exclusion, no sup- 
per. ' ' 39 Or as Konrad Grebel, the one who first 
dared to baptize a Christian upon whose brows 
magic holy water had been sprinkled in infancy, 
wrote to the worldly Muenzer, "From the 
Scriptures we learn that baptism signifies that 
by faith and the blood of Christ our sins have 
been washed away, that we have died to sin 
and walk in newness of life, and that assurance 
of salvation is through the inner baptism, — 
faith, — so that water does not confirm and in- 
crease the faith, as the Wittenberg theologians 
say, neither does it save." 40 Certainly this is 
a noble and a moderate statement to come from 
the man who through baptism with water in- 
stituted the new Church. And may I here in- 



39 Newman, op. cit., p. 179. 
wjBurrage, op. cit., p. 87. 



118 



The Beginnings of the Free Churches 

sert one of the most satisfying statements I 
have ever found regarding the use of the sacra- 
ments, even though it be a digression? It is 
from Hubmaier and reads thus: "In baptism, 
one pledges himself to God and in the supper 
to his neighbor, to offer body and blood in his 
stead as did Christ for us." 41 

Now I do not affirm that the so-called Ana- 
baptist movement had for its only impulse the 
freeing of the church from the trammels of 
the State. As with all men, the motives of the 
Anabaptist leaders were mixed. There was 
undoubtedly an element of Pharisaism in the 
movement, of jealousy of Zwingli and the 
preachers to the well-positioned, and a great 
pinch of impatience. Besides these inevitable 
dashes of evil, there was also a motive of great 
importance to which only passing reference has 
been made. It was a desire to reproduce the 
life and the customs of the early church and 
to follow literally the injunctions of Jesus and 
the New Testament. Harnack has said that 
there never has been a strong religious move- 
ment without dependence upon outward author- 
ity. That authority in the times of the 
Reformation was, of course, the Scripture. 
Nowhere was it in as high and undisputed favor 
as in Switzerland. After the Zwickauer 
prophets appeared, Luther in a letter to 
Melanchthon established a new canon: "Quod 
non est contra Scripturam pro Scriptura est et 

41 Vedder: Hubmaier, p. 108. 

119 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

Scriptura pro eo." (That which is not opposed 
to Scripture is in favor of Scripture and Scrip- 
ture is in favor of it.) But Zwingli adhered to 
Luther's earlier one: "Eo ipso contra Deum 
quod sino verbo Dei." (That which has no sup- 
port in God^s word is thereby proven to be op- 
posed to God.) 42 Hence the disputations 
on infant baptism were apparently deter- 
mined by the appeal to Scripture alone. 
Zwingli ? s assertion that infant baptism was 
the divinely instituted substitute for circum- 
cision and that circumcision was explicitly com- 
manded in the Scripture, always carried the 
city councils, 43 who had other unexpressed rea- 
sons for their decision, but it did not convince 
the lav mind. Hence we find Sebastian Franck 
declaring that the Anabaptists built upon the 
letter of the Scripture, and it may well have 
been true that many of the humbler classes 
joined themselves to the sect not because of 
their desire for a free church but because of 
their desire for scriptural baptism. I think it 
it is clear that the rank and file grew insistent 
on adult baptism simply because it was in 
accord with the obvious meaning of Scripture. 
And yet there were always those among the 
Anabaptists who saw deeper. Georg Schoferl 
of Freistaedt, for example, asserted that 
"Christ taught the common people the gospel 

by means of their own handicrafts, but for the 

* 

4! Xewman, op. cit., pp. 66, 73. Egli: Geschichte der Schireizerischen. 
Reformation, p. 57. 

« Cf. Jackson's Zwingli. Chapter XII. 

120 



The Beginnings of the Free Churches 

sake of the stiff-necked scribes he used Scrip- 
ture, for which purpose also it must still be 
used and not for the sake of the common man, 
for he can be more successfully instructed by 
means of the creatures." 44 Hans Denck, hav- 
ing outgrown his Anabaptist faith, but one of 
the most prominent men in the whole spiritual 
movement, wrote in his dying statement: "I 
value the holy Scripture above all human trea- 
sures, but not so high as the Word of God, which 
is living, powerful and eternal, for it is God 
Himself, Spirit and no letter. ' ' 45 And so while 
Franck upbraided the Anabaptists for their 
literalism, Melanchthon reported scornfully 
that the Anabaptists in Jena claimed that the 
Bible must be taken spiritually. 46 At Muenster, 
before the extravagances had broken out, and 
the Lutherans and the Anabaptists sought for 
popular distinguishing watchwords, the shibbo- 
leth of the orthodox evangelicals was "Christ" 
while the significant shibboleth of the Anabap- 
tist sectaries was "Father." 47 With all their 
loyalty to the New Testament there was a spir- 
itual freedom and ecstasy about them that did 
not allow exclusive emphasis upon the historical 
and objective and that reproduced the charac- 
teristics of the primitive Christians. More than 
they, however, they emphasized the importance 
and rigor of Church Discipline, and when a con- 

44 Newman, op. cit., p. 220. 

45 Jones: Spiritual Reformers, p. 28. Hast: Wiedertdufer, p. 225. 
4 «C/. Hast: Wiedertdufer, p. 237. 

47 E. S. Bax: Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists, p. 150. 

121 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

siderable minority appeared in any local church 
it was a sure signal for secession. They were 
not strictly congregational in their organiza- 
tion; their leaders took the place and the au- 
thority of the apostles. But their authority 
was not sufficient to be widely recognized, so 
that in constant bickerings and divisions they 
dissipated their spiritual strength. 48 Under 
the stress of persecution without and bigotry 
within and under the black stain of the ' ' Messi- 
anic reign' ' at Muenster, the name Anabaptist 
became a byword and a hissing. But what they 
did was not done in a corner. The idea of a 
free-church became familiar to Europe and was 
transplanted to the saner and yet stolider race 
of the English. For underneath all jealousies 
and deeper than spiritual pride, the instinctive 
conviction that freedom is a necessary condi- 
tion of religion created a type of spiritual life 
which could not die out of Protestantism. 

48 Cf. for example the ancient book of Ubbo Philipps. 



122 



LECTURE V 

CONTBIBUTION OF CONGREGATION- 
ALISM TO CHURCH POLITY 



LECTURE V 

CONTRIBUTION OF CONGREGATION- 
ALISM TO CHURCH POLITY 

The first Protestant protagonists of free- 
dom, the Swiss and German Anabaptists, failed. 
Many reasons contributed to that failure. 
First of all, they were pioneers, and pioneers 
usually succeed by failing; that is their lot; 
they lay down their lives for their cause. The 
continent of Europe was prepared for a revolt 
against a religious tyranny with secular am- 
bitions; it was not prepared for a weakening 
of centralized government; freedom and an- 
archy it could not differentiate. The apostles of 
freedom expected to be hounded and they were 
not disappointed. 

But they contributed quite unnecessarily to 
the realization of their expectation. Their 
leaders were extremists and guilty of many 
excesses. The orgy of Muenster was in itself 
sufficient to unite the higher forces of civiliza- 
tion against the movement out of which it 
issued. If polygamy and the mistaking of a 
cobbler for Elijah were the fruits of religious 
freedom, then freedom was only another name 
for insanity. 

Moreover, these apostles of freedom, like 

125 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

most of those who range themselves under its 
banner, were not altogether free. They were 
bound to reproduce the forms as well as the 
spirit of the Apostolic Age, as that age was 
revealed in the Scriptures. Unlike the Congre- 
gationalists and Presbyterians of a later dec- 
ade, they did not overlook the apostles; they 
went so far as to consider them the leading 
figures in the apostolic age. Unable to regard 
them as extraordinary and as unrepeatable as 
the miracles, they allowed freedom and author- 
ity to their own apostles. They thus blocked 
their path to democracy, but they were kept 
nearer to the temper and the forms of the New 
Testament. But this imitative polity gave to 
ill-balanced and unbalanced leaders opportuni- 
ties for carnage which their fanaticism used 
only too well. Splits and counter-splits at the 
dictates of leaders reduced the ship of freedom 
to splinters; it foundered on mines which its 
own crew had sown. 

Then, too, the word "Anabaptist" was not 
a mere nickname. The cause of freedom never 
gets clear of entangling alliances, nor did it in 
this case. It was obscured by a debate about 
a sacrament. It is true that to the Anabaptists 
the rite was only a sign of an inner reality, but 
the world was slow to believe that men would 
lay down their lives for anything which they 
did not deem of ultimate importance. It could 
not understand — even in those days — how a rite 
in itself unessential could become essential by 

126 



Contribution to Church Polity 

being commanded in the Bible. The issue 
seemed to many who thought more than they 
spoke a question of baptism rather than of 
freedom of faith. 

And not only that, but the word "Ana" in 
this compound nickname Anabaptist was not 
altogether out of place. Here again, the noble 
men who were thus dubbed protested earnestly. 
They did not believe in being baptized over 
again; they had never been baptized. But 
there could be no question that they renounced 
communion with the great body of Christian 
people. If they did so because of an unessen- 
tial rite, then they were fanatics beyond the 
sacred pale of common sense; if they did so 
because they did not believe in the Christianity 
of Christendom, then they were Pharisees, 
Donatists, Novatians, Perfectionists, judgers 
of their brethren, bigots. When Roger Wil- 
liams later accused King Charles of blasphemy 
for calling Europe Christendom, 1 he spoke the 
truth, as to-day we know only too well, but he 
became unendurable even to the Pilgrim 
Fathers. If Separatists cannot convert the 
world to their view, so that they are Separatists 
no more, they are bound to go under. Non- 
Conformists who are too weak to be more than 
that are bound to be regarded as moral prigs, 
bound to be an eddy in the great stream of 
social and political life. 

And so, for these reasons among others, the 

1 Winthrop: History of New England (Savage's edition), Vol. II, p. 145. 

127 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

noble movement for real freedom in religion 
on the continent of Europe failed. It was over- 
borne by its revolutionary significance, by the 
fanaticism of its leaders, by the inadequacy of 
its chosen sign, by the uncertainty of its polity 
and the elusiveness of its authority, and by its 
unescapable tendency to Pharisaic exclusive- 
ness. It failed. And from its failure Europe 
has never recovered. The present war may be 
more wrapped up with that failure than any of 
us are aware. Religion has been cramped into 
national moulds; it has served and idealized 
and emphasized the State, its benefactor and 
subsidizer. It has strengthened rather than 
weakened the prejudices of race. It has fol- 
lowed common sense, and common sense, always 
intent on immediate good and unconcerned with 
wider issues, quite untransformed by the uni- 
versal impulses of real religion, has produced 
a catastrophe in comparison with which Muen- 
ster may again be mistaken for the New 
Jerusalem. 

It is the glory of Congregationalism to have 
taken up the struggle for religious freedom and 
to have succeeded where Anabaptism failed. 
To it does not belong the glory of conceiving a 
free church, untrammeled by all connection 
with the State. To that great idea the Baptists 
have the prior claim and to it they have shown 
the more abiding loyalty. But I do not think 
it is too much to say that what Anabaptists 
failed to do in Europe, Congregationalists ac- 

128 



Contribution to Church Polity 

complished in America. They were the chief 
influence in bringing about a civilization which 
is chiselled on the lines of freedom and in which 
religion has, as nowhere else, its proper and 
efficient place. 

And this great service to religion and man- 
kind, Congregationalists performed in their 
own despite. There was that in their principles 
and in their natures which forced them to a free 
church in which at the outset they did not be- 
lieve. The idea of a church utterly disassoci- 
ated from the state was known in England 
through the uproar occasioned by the proceed- 
ings and the persecutions of the Anabaptists. 
And it was well-nigh universally reprobated. 
The Congregationalists held in England the 
position on the extreme left which the Ana- 
baptists held in Europe. They were equally 
despised and three of their prominent leaders 
were executed as enemies to the realm. But 
the Congregationalists were at one with their 
countrymen in upholding the idea of a state 
church; they only insisted that the state au- 
thorities execute the mandates of the Scrip- 
tures on church polity. Of the first ridi- 
culed and persecuted leaders, there is only one 
who seems to call for a free church, — and he not 
quite. He was the theorist among them, a man 
of considerable more brain than character, who 
had the advantage over his brethren of not be- 
ing compelled by his conscience to persist in his 
own theories, if they didn't work at the first 

129 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

trial. His name was Robert Browne. He is 
called the Father of Congregationalism, not be- 
cause he was the leader of the first autonomous 
church — Fitz was that 2 — or because out of his 
church grew the first enduring Congregational 
society, for it died, but because not being both- 
ered by experience, he drew up a program and 
a constitution in which he set forth the abiding 
characteristics of our polity. Concerning the 
relation of church and state, Browne writes 
thus: "Yet may they (the magistrates) doo 
nothing concerning the Church, but onelie ciuile, 
and as civile Magistrates they have not that 
authoritie ouer the Church, as to be Prophetes 
or Priestes or spiritual Kings, as they are Mag- 
istrates ouer the same: but onelie to rule the 
common wealth in all outwarde Iustice, to 
maintain the right welfare and honor thereof, 
with outward power, bodily punishment, and 
ciuil forcing of men. And therfore also be- 
cause the church is in a common wealth, it is 
of their charge : that is concerning the outward 
prouision and outward iustice, they are to look 
to it, but to compel religion, to plant churches 
by power, and to force a submission by lawes 
and penalties belongeth not to them, . . . 
neither yet to the church. Let vs not therfore 
tarie for the Magistrates. ... If they be not 
christians should the welfare of the church or 
the saluation of men hang on their courtesie?" 3 

2 Cf. Champlain Burrage: Early English Dissenters, Vol. I, 93. 
a I.e., Vol. I, p. 105. 

130 



Contribution to Church Polity 

Even Browne assigns to the State the outward 
provision of the Church, but because of his gen- 
eral drift toward Anabaptist freedom from sec- 
ular control, his name was distasteful even to 
his Congregational successors. Penry, for exam- 
ple, himself a martyr, declares that "he hates 
all schism, Donatist, Anabaptist or Brown- 
ist. ' ' 4 Jacob, the founder of the first explicitly 
Congregational church in England that did not 
go into exile, does not hesitate to say that "we 
and all true visible churches ought to be kept 
in order by the' stretching out of the magis- 
trate's arm." 5 Bradshaw in 1605 proclaims 
that the Civil magistrate "is the only one on 
earth that has power to punish a whole church 
or congregation. " 6 The independent petition 
to the Rump Parliament in 1650 desires com- 
pulsory worship, a parliamentary commission 
to regulate ministers and the construing of 
open speaking against the fundamentals of 
Christianity as an offense against the State. 7 
Cromwell established a church — the broadest 
and most Congregational ever conceived — but 
he established it. And when we come to our own 
American forebears, we find them assuming the 
same position. Of all Puritan emigrants to 
America, the Pilgrim Fathers were the most 
liberal and sensible, but even they had no 
clearly held notion of separation between 

4 Cf. Champlain Burrage: Early English Dissenters, Vol. I, p. 150, note 2. 

5 Cf. I.e., Vol. I, pp. 3, 10. H. W. Clark: History of English Non- 
Conformity, p. 200. 

6 Burrage, op. cit., Vol. I % p. 288. 
i Clark, op. cit., p. 356. 

131 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

Church and State. Eobinson and Brewster over 
their own signatures agreed to take the oath 
of supremacy, if thereby they could have their 
form of polity written into their charter from 
the King. 8 They even went to such lengths of 
concession as to recognize the right of his Maj- 
esty to appoint bishops "to oversee the 
churches and governe them civilly unto whom 
they are in all things to give an account and 
by them to be ordered according to godliness." 9 
They did not regard Church and State as two 
independent powers before they set sail for 
America. Nor did they later. From Salem, 
Gov. Endicott sent back two worthy men to 
England because they insisted on worshipping 
according to the rites of the English church. 10 
The Colonies of New Haven and Massachusetts 
Bay limited both the office holders and voters to 
members in Congregational churches, no other 
church being allowed. 11 Massachusetts Bay, the 
strongest of all these colonies, under the mas- 
terful influence of Winthrop, spent no incon- 
siderable part of its legislative activity in eccle- 
siastical matters. Its first piece of legislation 
was a mandate that "houses should be erected 
for the ministers with convenient speed at the 
public charge. ' ' 12 One man was whipped and 
banished for writing letters to England slander- 

* Bradford's History of Plimouth Plantation, p. 44- 

9 Cf. Williston Walker: History of Congregationalism, p. 61; Creeds and 
Platforms of Congregationalism, pp. 89-90. 

10 Walker: History of Congregationalism, p. 107. 

" I.e., pp. 114, 120, 122, 123. 

12 Winthrop, op. cit., Vol. I., p. 36, note. 

132 



Contribution to Church Polity 

ing the government and the orders of the 
churches; 13 another was banished for affirming 
in a petition that the Court had condemned the 
truth of Christ; 14 another was banished for 
claiming that he had not sinned for six months 
and that he was free from original sin; 15 an- 
other was fined for writing a book against taxa- 
ation for the support of the ministers. 16 In 
1638 a law was passed, which however was 
repealed in the next year, giving the Court 
power to fine, imprison or banish any one who 
had remained in a State of Excommunication 
from the church for six months. Further, "the 
denial of the books of the old and new testa- 
ment — which were all enumerated — to be the 
written and infallible Word of God was punish- 
able either by banishment or death for the sec- 
ond offence at the discretion of the Court, 
and an inhabitant who was guilty of this 
offence upon the high seas was made liable 
to the penalty. ' ' 17 Anabaptists were ban- 
ished, a woman hung for witchcraft and 
four Quakers executed — all in the very har- 
bor of Boston. 18 Roger Williams and Mrs. 
Hutchinson, enthusiasts and virtual perfec- 
tionists, were banished, though they were 

13 Cf. Winthrop, Vol. I, pp. 68, 73. 
w I.e., Vol. I, p. 29. 
i 6 I.e., Vol. II, p. 22. 
™Cf.l.c, Vol. II, p. 112. 

17 Hutchinson: History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, Vol. I, pp. 
423, US. 

18 Cf. Walker: History of Congregationalism, pp. 128, 147-148, 197. 
Winthrop, op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 149, 212, 307, 308, 832, 397. Bradford, 
op. cit., p. 461. John Stetson Beary: History of Massachusetts. First 
Period, pp. 363-372. Hutchinson, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 320-321. 

133 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

pious, clever and Congregational. 19 A minister 
was prohibited by the Court from preaching 
at a wedding; 20 a minister was summoned for 
daring to organize a second church in Saugus 
without a council; 21 the church was first ad- 
vised and later commanded to undertake a 
mission to the Indians. 22 The Court in 1646 
distinctly stated that the magistrates were 
bound to maintain the churches in purity and 
truth and hence could summon them to councils 
they deemed necessary. 23 And in 1648 the Cam- 
bridge Synod thus summoned and attended by 
all the New England Colonies, decreed that the 
power of the Magistrate should be exercised 
about such outward acts "as are commanded 
or forbidden in the Word." "Heresy, venting 
corrupt and pernicious opinions, . . . are to be 
restrained and punished by civil authority. " 24 
At one point, it is true, our fathers were wise ; 
though the state could interfere with the 
church, the church could not interfere with the 
state. 25 Even at Plymouth the Governor 
walked before the minister, though for pur- 
poses of safety he walked behind Captain 
Standish. 26 A church member could not be 
called to account for his acts as magistrate nor 

19 Winthrop, op. cit, Vol. I, pp. 188, 194, 195, 198, 199, 204, 209-210, 
293. Walker: History of Congregationalism, p. 135. 

2 Winthrop, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 382. 

2i I.e., Vol. I, pp. 187, 210, 220. Vol. II, p. 194. Walker: History, p. 
137. 

22 Walker: History, p. 165. 

23 Winthrop, op. cit, Vol. II, p. 323. 

24 Walker: Creeds and Platforms, pp. 236-237. 

25 Winthrop, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 300. 

26 I regret not to be able at present to refer to the original authority for 
this statement. 

134 



Contribution to Church Polity 

could a minister be also a magistrate. 27 On 
important points of public as well as ecclesias- 
tical policy the ministers were summoned by 
the court to give advice, but only advice. 28 Not 
until 1684 was the franchise extended in Mas- 
sachusetts to those who were not members of 
churches. It was only in 1729 that Baptists 
and Quakers were excused from taxation for 
the support of Congregational clergy, and the 
Episcopalians had to wait six years longer. 29 
Taxation for church purposes was discontinued 
only in 1818 in Connecticut and in 1834 
in Massachusetts. There can be no pretense 
that these Congregational champions of free- 
dom grasped the great principle of freedom 
from the state. And bitterly did they pay for 
their error. It was through the act of the 
Connecticut legislature that the Saybrook 
Synod was called together to standardize 
church practises in the colony. That Synod vir- 
tually renounced the liberty for which their 
fathers braved so many perils. It tied up the 
churches to what the Hartford North Associa- 
tion ninety years later proudly called "not Con- 
gregationalism but essentially Presbyterian. ' ' 30 
This standardization, this tendency to con- 
formity and consolidation, which legislatures 

27 Winthrop, op. cit, Vol. I, pp. 299-301. 

28 Cf. Winthrop, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 117, 133, 183. Hutchinson, op. 
cit, Vol. I, p. 424. 

29 Acts and Resolves of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, Vol. II, pp. 
494-496, 714-715, 782-783. At first the support of the clergy seems to have 
been voluntary, but in 1664, as the country towns grew lax, a law providing for 
ministerial support was passed. Hutchinson, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 427. 

30 Cf. Walker: History of Congregationalism, p. 207, for a milder judgment 
of the Saybrook Synod. 

135 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

so like and which this Connecticut legislature 
caused, operated to create friendlier feelings 
toward the Presbyterians of the Middle States 
than to the Simon pure Congregationalism of 
Massachusetts, and had not a little to do with 
the ' ' Plan of Union, ' ' so fatal to the growth of 
the independent churches. A still graver loss 
may be directly traced to this interference of the 
state in matters of church practise and support. 
The Unitarian schism would have been much 
less widespread and much less damaging in 
material ways if members of the parishes — as 
distinct from members of the churches — had 
not felt a right to have a voice in the calling 
of the pastor for whom they were taxed. This 
feeling became aggressive and the famous 
Dedham decision followed, disallowing the right 
of any church to exist apart from its parish. 
In many churches that became known as Uni- 
tarian, the votes of the Parish determined the 
matter. They welcomed Unitarianism because 
it seemed to them less insistent on the deeper 
experience of religion. It was more humane and 
therefore more to their liking. And so the 
world, tied up to the church, wrecked it when 
the chance came its way. For Unitarianism, 
the representative of liberal-minded religion, 
was swamped by the dominance of the unre- 
ligious, and the wing that was more conserva- 
tive and more religious — though perhaps more 
mistaken doctrinally — lost much of its footing 
in the community which it had founded. 

136 



Contribution to Church Polity 

Yet notwithstanding this colossal mistake 
of tying Church and State together, Congrega- 
tionalism succeeded eventually in establishing 
a free church in America, which is more influ- 
ential and more thoroughgoing in its freedom 
than any other of the free churches of the 
world. And it did more than that. For not 
only are Church and State separated in Amer- 
ica as in no other Christian nation) save per- 
haps most recently in France), but no matter 
how strict the connectionalism of some of the 
denominations may be, the individual church 
is regarded throughout the country as the real 
seat of power. The courts of New York State 
have recently ruled that a Presbytery, while 
possessing the right to dissolve a Presbyterian 
church without its consent, cannot thereby 
procure the right to its building, inherent in the 
Board of its Trustees as a civil corporation. 
This heavy straw shows the direction of the 
wind here in America. We are widely congre- 
gationally organized — the Baptists, Disciples, 
Congregationalists and smaller bodies make up 
a very large per cent, of American Christianity 
— but we are almost altogether congregation- 
ally spirited. 

That Congregationalism has had so large a 
part in so vast a spiritual achievement is due I 
think primarily to four factors, two of which 
were formal and two of which were personal 
and providential. Though there are many fas- 

137 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

cinating by-ways into which I should like to 
enter, we must confine our attention to these. 

The first of these factors is, of course, the 
fundamental Congregational conviction con- 
cerning the nature of the church. There is 
little difference here among the various notable 
Congregational pronouncements. In 1606, for 
example, the church at Amsterdam, antedating 
the famous Pilgrim Church at Leyden, declared 
itself as follows in the petition it presented at 
the accession of King James : " Every true visi- 
ble Church is a company of people called and 
separated from the world by the word of God 
and joyned together by voluntarie profession of 
the faith of Christ in the fellowship of the 
Gospell. Being thus joyned, every Church hath 
power in Christ to take unto themselves meet 
and sufficient persons into the Offices and func- 
tions of Pastors, Teachers, Elders, Deacons 
and Helpers, as those which Christ hath ap- 
pointed in his Testament. ' ' 31 With this con- 
curs the declaration of the famous Cambridge 
Synod of 1648, called by the Massachusetts 
Court: "A Congregational-church, is by the 
institution of Christ a part of the Militant- 
visible-church, consisting of a company of 
Saints by calling, united into one body, by a 
holy covenant, for the publick worship of God, 
and the mutuall edification one of another, in 
the Fellowship of the Lord Jesus. . . . There 
may be the essence and being of a church with- 

31 Williston Walker: Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism, pp. 78-79 . 

138 



Contribution to Church Polity 

out any officers. Nevertheless, though officers 
be not absolutely necessary to the simple being 
of churches . . . yet ordinarily they are to their 
well-being. ' ' 32 This insistence not only upon 
the independence but complete autonomy of the 
particular church was regarded by the fathers 
as of the very essence of Congregationalism. 
No ordaining councils, with ministers of neigh- 
boring churches placing their hands upon the 
head of the elected pastor, obscured the self- 
completeness of the churches. In Browne's 
primitive church in Middleburg, we find his 
more substantial colleague Harrison writing in 
1583: "Whereas they tie the Ordination of 
euerie Minister, as it were, vnto the girdle of 
other Ministers — that is to laie a greater bond- 
age vpon ye churches than they are able to bear. 
For admitt there be onelie one church in a na- 
tion, and they want a pastour : must they seeke 
ouer Sea and lande, to gett a minister ordained 
by other ministers '? — And is it not a dishonour 
to Christ Jesus, the head of euery congregation, 
which is his bodie : to say that his body together 
with the heade, is not able to be sustained and 
preserued in it selfe?" 33 

The first ordination and election of a 
minister upon American soil at the church of 
Salem, "which was ye 2. church erected in these 
parts," conformed strictly to this conception. 
One of the participants in that transaction on 

32 Williston Walker: Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism, pp. 205, 210. 
Z3 Burrage: Early English Dissenters, Vol. I, p. 107. 

139 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

the 20th of July, 1629, writes thus only ten days 
later : " So Mr. Skelton was chosen pastor, and 
Mr. Higginson to be teacher; and they accept- 
ing the choyce, Mr. Higginson, with 3. or 4. of 
the gravest members of ye church, laid their 
hands on Mr. Skelton, using prayer therewith. 
This being done, ther was imposission of hands 
on Mr. Higginson also. And now, good Sir (the 
letter was written to Governor Bradford at 
Plymouth) I hope that you and ye rest of God's 
people with you will say that hear was a right 
foundation layed, and that these 2. blessed ser- 
vants of ye Lord came in at ye dore, and not at 
ye window.' ' 34 And Winthrop, notwithstand- 
ing his aristocratic leanings, is compelled to 
make the following entry in his fascinating 
journal under the date of Sept. 22, 1642: "The 
village at the end of Charlestown bounds was 
called Woburn, where they had gathered a 
church, and this day Mr. Carter was ordained 
their pastor, with the assistance of the elders 
of other churches. Some difference there was 
about his ordination; some advised (I suspect 
Winthrop himself of being the spokesman of 
these some) in regard they had no elder of their 
own, nor any members very fit to solemnize such 
an ordinance, they would desire some of the 
elders of the other churches to have performed 
it ; but others supposing it might be an occasion 
of introducing a dependency of churches, etc., 
and so a presbytery, would not allow it. So it 

34 Bradford: History of Plimouth Plantation, p. 317. 

140 



Contribution to Church Polity 

was performed by one of their own members, 
but not so well and orderly as it ought. ' ' 35 With 
such a godly fear prevailing among the settlers 
of the Bay, we can understand why it was that 
sturdy objection was raised to fortnightly min- 
isters ' meetings, but Winthrop writes that 
"this fear was without cause; for they were all 
clear in that point, that no church or person 
can have power over another church. ' ' 36 Were 
it well if that godly fear could again be stirred 
into life to-day? 

Historians have often Wondered why the 
New England churches were all gathered in the 
Congregational way, when the Pilgrim Fathers 
were the only outspoken Congregationalists 
among the emigrants. But it would seem to me 
that the Puritans of the Church of England, 
who dominated the flourishing colony of Massa- 
chusetts Bay, were better acquainted with 
Congregationalism than with Presbyterianism. 
Take away the bishops from the Church of Eng- 
land, and you have left parish churches, one of 
which, at least, in the 17th century had secured 
the right of electing its own clergymen. 37 In 
1605, we find a non-separatist affirming: "A 
true Visible or Ministeriall Church of Christ is 
a particular Congregation being a spirituall 
perfect Corporation of Believers, and having 
power in its selfe immediately from Christ to 
administer all Religious meanes of faith to the 

35 Winthrop, op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 109, 110. 

36 I.e., Vol. I, p. 139. 

87 Cf. Burrage: New Facts Concerning John Robinson, p. 21. 

141 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

members thereof/' 38 And John Endecott of 
Salem assures Gov. Bradford that the Plym- 
outh form of God's worship is "the same 
which I have professed and maintained, ever 
since the Lord in mercie revealed himself e unto 
me ; being f arr from the commone reporte that 
hath been spread of you touching that perticu- 
ler. ' ' 39 The astute John Robinson was right in 
assuring the daring adventurers of the deep 
"that many of those who both wrate and 
preached against them, if they were in a place 
wher they might have libertie and live com- 
fortably, they would then practise as they 
did." 40 At any rate we have Bradford's word 
for it "that there was no agreement by any 
solemn or common consultation, but that it is 
true they did, as if they had agreed, by the 
same spirit of truth and unity, set up, by the 
help of Christ, the same model of churches, one 
like to another; and if they of Plimouth have 
helped any of the first comers in their theory 
by hearing and discerning their practises, 
therein the Scripture is fulfilled that the King- 
dom of heaven is like unto leaven which a 
woman took and hid in a measure of meal until 
the whole was leavened. ' ' 41 

But fundamentally our forefathers were Con- 
gregationalists not because of the habits of the 
past, nor certainly because they believed our 

38 Early English Dissenters, Vol. I, pp. 286. 
39 Bradford, op. cit., p. 316. 

40 Hutchinson: History of Massachusetts Bay, Vol. I, p. 1+18 (quoted from 
Bradford) . 

"Burrage, op. cit, Vol. I, p. 362. 

142 



Contribution to Church Polity 

polity conducive to religious growth and ex- 
pressive of individual liberty, but because they 
discovered it in the New Testament. Unlike the 
more logical Anabaptists, they simply struck 
out from the church organization all apostles, 
prophets and evangelists as extraordinary and 
proceeded to organize on ordinary ground. This 
saving bit of arbitrary exegesis saved them 
from that completely imitative polity of the 
founders of the continental free churches, and 
gave us Congregationalism. It was however a 
long time after it had been practised that any 
other reason was assigned for its erection than 
that it was so ordained in the Word of God. 
Only under the sting of the Saybrook platform 
and its treason to fundamental principles of 
church independency, did John Wise, "Pastor 
to a Church in Ipswich," dare to put Congrega- 
tionalism on an independent basis. After of 
course affirming unquestionable Biblical au- 
thority for it, he proceeds as he says to "open 
a new realm of thought" by writing: "When 
the aforesaid government or power, settled in 
all, when they have Elected certain capable Per- 
song, to Minister in their affairs, and the said 
Ministers remain accountable to the Assembly 
. . . they will be more apt and inclined to steer 
Right for the main Point, viz., The peculiar 
good, and benefit of the whole, and every par- 
ticular member fairly and sincerely. And why 
may not these stand for very Rational Pleas in 
Church Order? For certainly if Christ has set- 

143 



Some Turning -Points in Church History 

tied any form of Power in his Church, he has 
done it for his Churches safety, and for the 
Benefit of every Member : Then he must needs 
have been presumed to have made choice of 
that Government as should least Expose his 
People to Hazard, either from the fraud, or 
Arbitrary measures of particular Men. And 
it is plain as day light, there is no Species of 
Government like a Democracy to attain this 
End." 42 Here, indeed, as far as was then pos- 
sible, is Congregationalism made to stand upon 
its own feet. It is the true Christian polity, 
not merely because it is undoubtedly biblical 
but because it is just as undoubtedly conducive 
to the spiritual welfare of men. Yea, "Wise goes 
a step further forward when he proclaims Con- 
gregationalism to be alone in harmony with 
essential manhood. "He (God) sets the Will to 
turn about itself without forcing it, that so 
man's Eeligion may be the free and candid 
Emanations of his Noble and Exalted Nature. 
But when God has thus gained Man; may we 
rationally imagine that in erecting his Trophies 
he will assign and make him over to some Petty 
and Arbitrary Potentates in matters of Re- 
ligion? or settle him under a Despotick Gov- 
ernment as though he was the spoils of a spite- 
ful War ? No certainly, but Man must now be 
considered as some high Allie invested with 
more Power than ever." 43 Thus deeply and 

42 Wise: A Vindication of the Government of New England Churches, p. 62. 
« I.e., pp. 72-78. 

144 



Contribution to Church Polity 

strongly does Wise found Congregationalism 
on that reverence for man which is of the es- 
sence of Christianity, with which it comports 
and which it does so much to emphasize. 

The other formal factor which I would em- 
phasize is not fellowship, though it is very 
abiding and important. But fellowship was 
nothing novel; men had been fellowshipped to 
death; it was the freedom of fellowship which 
made it beneficial. I choose for brief remark 
rather the definite bond of union which in Con- 
gregational eyes, from the very beginning, 
makes a group of men into a church, viz., the 
Covenant. 44 The exiles in Frankfurt in Queen 
Mary's time made use of such an instrument, 45 
and Burrage tells us that some of the Conti- 
nental Anabaprtists did likewise, 46 but in the 
former case the covenant was an afterthought 
introduced as the basis of discipline and in the 
latter it was not the constituting element. But 
from the very first, beginning with Eobert 
Browne and possibly even with Fitz, a Congre- 
gational church was created by the covenant. 
The precise importance of the covenant is no- 
where better set forth than in a letter of a Vicar 
of Cranf ord in 1640 : ' ' The Brownists stick not 
only at our Bishops, seruice and Ceremonies 
but at our Church. They would haue euery 
particular congregation to be independent. 

44 Cf. Hutchinson: History of Massachusetts Bay, Vol. I, p. 420. Here 
the covenant and not fellowship is mentioned as one of the fundamental Con- 
gregational principles. 

45 Burrage, op. cit., Vol, I, p. 7 A. 

46 I.e., Vol. I, p. 98, 

145 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

They would haue none enter Communion but 
by solmne Couenant. Not that made in Bap- 
tisme, or renewed in the Supper of the Lord, 
but another for reformation after theire owne 
way : ' ' 47 The Covenant was precisely what the 
scandalized Vicar thought and almost said. It 
was in reality a third sacrament, far more im- 
portant than the minimized baptism, adminis- 
tered in infancy, and a prerequisite for the en- 
joyment of the Supper. It is somewhat difficult 
to see how they discovered this significance of 
the Covenant in the Scripture; it looks almost 
as if they installed the Covenant in this all- 
important place by the compulsion of their 
moral instincts. At any rate they thereby 
made good a serious defect of the Anabap- 
tists. They put an act of the will, com- 
pelled by the Holy Spirit, at the foundation 
of the Church and thus completely broke with 
sacramentalism. The Baptists, as we have 
seen, did not ascribe salvation to baptism, but 
their insistence upon it as the bond of church 
fellowship has confused their own life and mis- 
represented them before the world. From the 
beginning, the Congregationalist has empha- 
sized moral values in religious experience. The 
autonomy of the church and the entrance into 
its holy activities and privileges through a per- 
sonal commitment of the life to its Creator has 
made it an undeviating and effective witness to 
the supreme worth of the individual will. It 

47 Burr age, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 311. 

146 



Contribution to Church Polity 

has presented Christianity to men at its sim- 
plest and most characteristic point, unmixed 
magic or pomp. It is a singularly pure exem- 
plar of the voluntary principle in religion. 

Prom the beginning Congregational covenants 
have been of the simplest sort. Some good Prov- 
idence guided the instinct of our fathers into 
ways that led to liberty. John Robinson, the 
pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers, declared: 
"Euery true Church of God is ioyned with him 
in holye covenant by voluntarye profession to 
haue him the God therof and to bo his peo- 
ple." 48 In 1616 Henry Jacob "founded" a 
Congregational church in London. We read: 
"They joyned both hands each with other 
Brother and stood in a Ring-wise: their intent 
being declared, H. Jacob and each of the Rest 
made some confession or Profession of their 
Faith and Repentance, some were longer, some 
were briefer, Then they covenanted together 
to walk in all Gods Ways as he revealed or 
should make known to them." 4 " And to go ten 
years further back to the sacred soil of 
Norwich, where the Church arose which went 
in part by way of alien Leyden to America, 
Bradford makes this affecting note in his rather 
matter-of-fact journal: "So many therfore of 
these proffessors as saw the evil of these thin: 
in thes parts, and whose hearts ye Lord had 
touched with heavenly zeale for his trueth, tl 

rrage: New Fad* COHCtrBUM) John Robinson, p. 17. 
*RttrrO0e: Early Ew,jlx>h L Vol. II, p. k'j.',. 

147 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

shooke of this yoake of antichristian bondage, 
and as ye Lord's free people, joyned themselves 
(by a covenant of the Lord) into a Church 
estate, in ye fellowship of ye gospell, to walke 
in all his wayes, made known, or to be made 
known unto them, according to their best en- 
deavours, whatsoever it should cost them, the 
Lord assisting them. And that it cost them 
something this ensewing historie will de- 
clare. ' ' 50 And this simplicity of the Covenant 
declaration was preserved in the new country, 
the noble confession of the first gathered 
church, the church in Salem, leading the way. 
The confession is still in use and reads as fol- 
lows: "We covenant with the Lord and one 
with an other; and doe bynd ourselves in the 
presence of God, to walke together in all his 
waies, according as he is pleased to reveale 
himself unto us in his Blessed word of truth." 
In the Providence of God, the confessions of 
faith usually adopted by the individual 
churches have fallen away and the Covenant 
as the sole basis of church membership and 
Christian belief for both ministers and laymen 
is becoming more and more the rule in our 
churches. Is it any wonder that the differen- 
tiating mark of Congregationalism is neither 
conservatism nor liberalism but true Catholic- 
ity of temper? For the ancient declaration of 
Bradshaw in 1605 still stands: "They hould 
that Christ Jesus hath not subiected any 

60 Bradford: History of Plimouth Plantation, p. IS. 

148 



Contribution to Church Polity 

Church or Congregation of his, to any other 
superior Ecclesiasticall Jurisdiction, then vnto 
that which is within itself. So that yf a wholl 
Churche or Congregation shall erre, in any 
matters of faith or religion, noe other Churches 
or Spirituall Church officers haue (by any war- 
rant from the word of God) power to censure, 
punish, or controule the same : but are onely to 
counsell and aduise the same, and so leaue their 
Soules to the immediate Iudgment of Christ." 51 
Having thus won the proud distinction of pro- 
viding the church of Christ with the only pos- 
sible basis of Catholicity, the vast responsibil- 
ity is upon us of demonstrating that Catholicity 
and Holiness are not mutually exclusive terms. 
We have rewritten the word Catholic before the 
word Church; would that with as good con- 
science we might point to our groups of Chris- 
tian disciples and feel, if we did not say, "Here 
are holy catholic churches." 

There is time for only the briefest refer- 
ence to the two non-ecclesiastical factors 
in the lasting triumph of our polity. The first 
of these is the personal character of the Pil- 
grim and Puritan Fathers; the second, a new 
country in which to work our polity out. With- 
out them our principles would not be written 
so large in religious history, yet for them our 
principles were not responsible. As in every 
other crisis of church polity we have discov- 
ered that the condition of the world at large 

61 Burrage, op. cit., Vol. 7, p. 288. 

149 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

was partly responsible for the course and the 
outcome of the development of Christian or- 
ganization, so it is here. A thoroughgoing 
study of Church Polity would be fascinating 
in the extreme, because it would be an investi- 
gation of those currents of human thought and 
emotion sufficiently widespread and dominant 
to express themselves in the activities of one of 
the two abiding institutions of human society. 
No Church polity was made from inner im- 
pulses alone and each advance step has de- 
pended upon a Providential interaction of in- 
ternal and external forces. In observing the 
mighty achievement of our ecclesiastical ideals, 
we have to record our gratitude that it was at- 
tained largely by the personal character of 
their representatives and the unparalleled op- 
portunity of an unoccupied land which their 
daring and their patience utilized. 

I am not so sure that Bacon was wrong when 
he declared in 1592 that the Brownists in Eng- 
land were "a very small number of very base 
and silly people, ' ' for at that time all who were 
at all conspicuous were forced to flee to wide- 
hearted Holland. And of the exiles, there were 
not a few of a sort to justify Archbishop Ban- 
croft 's remark in 1593 : " I know the nature of 
schismatickes to bee of such giddinesse as that 
no one thinge will content them longe." 52 The 
"ancient church" in Amsterdam was speedily 
rent by dissensions that remind one of Ubbo 

* 2 Burrage, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 139. 

150 



Contribution to Church Polity 

Philipps' account of the Anabaptists and that 
caused an onlooker to say of them : ' i There are 
none willing to bee feete or any other inferior 
members, they would all bee heads." But the 
Pilgrim Fathers were of a different stripe. 
When forced to leave Scrooby, they landed at 
Amsterdam, but they purposely went further 
on to Leyden with the express desire to avoid 
mingling with the squabbles of their co-religion- 
ists who had preceded them thither. Both they 
and the Puritans who followed them to America 
left the Church of England with extreme re- 
luctance and only so far and for so long as 
their consciences impelled them. They never 
berated those who persecuted them and I have 
no doubt that John Robinson, at least, prayed 
for them. William Brewster and William 
Bradford were men of gentle though unwaver- 
ing character, of measureless patience and of 
sacrificing spirit. Of John Endecott we do not 
get a clear picture, but John Winthrop was kept 
both by his property and family interests from 
reviling order, from despising tolerance and 
from glorying in isolation. Roger Williams 
was not well treated by these men; it may be 
that he was too idealistic for them, it is certain 
that he was too self-righteous. When a man 
carries his separatism so far that he refuses 
to commune with his own wife, there is some- 
thing wrong with him. Williams became for a 
short while an Anabaptist, and with good rea- 
son, for that noble high-minded man is a splen- 

151 



Some Turning-Points in Church History 

did embodiment of the deep insight mixed 
with stubborn intolerance and ill-poised judg- 
ment that characterized that movement. 
Our progenitors succeeded just because they 
disliked their separatism and sought to make 
it as slight as might be. I do not know 
of any more sane and moving writings 
in the world than the respective journals 
of Bradford and Winthrop, which, with 
very necessary excisions, should be read by 
every lover of his country and his church. Were 
there time to quote the affecting but matter- 
of-fact eulogies which Bradford writes of 
Eobinson and Brewster, their worth and suc- 
cess would be clearer to you. The leaders were 
all men of experience with the world and the 
ministers were, many of them, among the most 
gifted graduates of Cambridge University. 
The Anabaptists left the State churches of the 
Continent with the three glad leaps which 
Christian took when he saw his burden drop 
into the sepulchre; the Congregationalists, on 
the other hand, made the change with much 
the same spirit with which the earliest Chris- 
tians were forced out of the synagogues. 
In religion it is only inevitable changes that are 
permanent changes; intolerant revolutions are 
short-lived. 

But it was the new country which reinforced 
the character of the Congregational separatists 
and robbed their separatism of the inevitable 
tinge of Pharisaism which must to the public 

152 



Contribution to Church Polity 

mind always inhere in a separatist fellowship 
which exists side by side with an established 
church. But with an ocean between you and 
your established church, the tinge of self -right- 
eousness disappears. Indeed, as we have seen, 
the separatists became in a sense the establish- 
ment ; only the freedom of their essential prin- 
ciple saved them from a shipwreck on the Scylla 
of governmental exclusiveness after having es- 
caped by a wide margin the danger of the Cha- 
rybdis of voluntary Pharisaism. It was the 
ocean and the Indians and the hard work of con- 
quering a new continent for the ways of civiliza- 
tion that kept the Pilgrims from the disaster 
that befell the Congregationalists of Middleburg 
and Amsterdam and from the mediocre success 
of English Independency. Governor Brad- 
ford's journal has more to say about the state 
of the beaver-trade than of the church. God 
kept the spirit of the fathers pure and strong 
by enforcing upon them, and finally by estab- 
lishing upon them, the work of their hands. 
The ocean is not only our best defence against 
the barbarous jealousies and armies of Europe ; 
it was the instrument of God for ridding a 
necessary religious revolution from bitterness 
and for fixing its attention upon its faith rather 
than upon its protest. For to that "deep, un- 
plumbed, estranging sea" we owe not a little 
of that great process by which Protestantism 
has become transformed into spiritual 
Catholicism. 

153 



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